Advisory Board
Abena Asare | Associate Professor, Africana Studies Department
Dr. Abena Ampofoa Asare is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University. Her research and writing span questions of human rights, citizenship and transformative justice in Africa and the African diaspora. Her work can be found in The Radical Teacher, The International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, African Arguments, and Foreign Policy in Focus, among other places. In 2018- 2019, she was Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her first book Truth Without Reconciliation: A Human Rights History of Ghana was chosen as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2018 by the American Library Association.
Robert Chase | Assistant Professor, Department of History
Robert Chase is a historian of prisons, policing and punishment. His research and teaching interests include the history of mass incarceration and the construction of what historians call "the carceral state." He is an expert in social justice, Latino/a and civil rights movements, and political and African American history. His forthcoming book reexamines the prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent construction of what many historians now call the era of mass incarceration.
Alina Denham | Assistant Professor, Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine; Director, Advanced Graduate Certificate in Aging Populations and Healthcare Administration
Dr. Denham is a health policy researcher whose research expertise lies in Medicaid policy, access to health and social services among marginalized populations, and health equity. She uses mixed methods to address pressing policy questions and guide health policy with the goal of maximizing access to health care and well-being of underserved individuals and families. Dr. Denham has published across a range of health policy and public health journals including Health Affairs, JAMA Health Forum, JAMA Network Open, Social Science and Medicine, Addiction, and Health Economics, Policy, and Law, among others. She serves on the advisory board of the Health Equity Interest Group of AcademyHealth.
Kathleen Fallon | Professor, Department of Sociology
Professor Fallon's interests lie within political sociology, international development, and gender studies. Specifically, she focuses on women’s social movements, women’s political rights, women's health, and democracy within sub-Saharan Africa, as well as across developing countries more broadly. She has done in-depth field research within Ghana, examining the influence of democratization on women’s rights and the emergence of the women’s movement, in addition to studying the influence of the international women's movement on local activism. Through comparative analyses across developing countries, and using both qualitative and quantitative methods, she has also researched how types of democratic transitions influence women's political representation, how women's legislative representation is linked to children's health outcomes, and how women's activism contributes to the spread of women's political quotas. She is currently working on projects that examine the effects of maternity leave policies on fertility and child health outcomes, as well as exploring what factors contribute to the passage of domestic violence laws across developing countries.
Stacey Finkelstein | Professor, College of Business
Professor Finkelstein earned her PhD and MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business in 2011. Her research is at the intersection of marketing and public policy, focusing on improving consumer well-being in domains such as healthcare, vaccination attitudes, food-decision making, and responsible retail practices. She is the Joint Editor in Chief of the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. In recognition of her work, she received the American Marketing Association (AMA) Marketing and Society Special Interest Group (MASSIG) Early Career Award in 2019. Professor Finkelstein and her co-authors also received the Journal of Consumer Affairs Best Paper Award in 2021 for their work exploring the impact of omission bias and moral culpability on parents' vaccination plans for their children. She is currently serving as Editor on a volume with Palgrave regarding ethical deployment of AI in healthcare settings, centering "end-users" (i.e., patients and clinicians).
Monique Fitzgerald | Climate Justice and Campaigns Director, Long Island Progressive Coalition (LIPC)
Monique Fitzgerald is a justice seeker, a community advocate and organizer. She has been working in her community for two decades. Focusing on mutual aid efforts, know your rights, community resource distribution, food sovereignty, environmental and climate justice. She was born and raised in North Bellport and is a Black and an indigenous person of occupied Long Island. Monique attended St Joseph’s College and obtained her bachelors degree in Community Health and Human Services in 2012. She then went on and obtained her Master’s degree at Stony Brook University School of Social Welfare. Her lived experiences and education put her on a path to work with great organizations and co-creating groups that are aligned with her values such as the Brookhaven Landfill Action and Remediation Group a grassroots intergenerational environmental justice group. She believes in the attainment of justice and liberation.
Anna Hayward | Associate Professor, School of Social Welfare
R. Anna Hayward, PhD, MSW is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University School
of Social Welfare. Dr. Hayward’s research focuses on father involvement, parental
incarceration, and environmental justice. Dr. Hayward serves as the Principal Investigator
on the evaluation of the federally funded Long Island Fatherhood Initiative examining the impact of a fatherhood, co-parenting, and economic stability intervention
on fathers well-being and parental involvement. Dr. Hayward has taught social work
internationally in Jamaica and Spain via two prestigious Fulbright Scholar fellowships
and serves on the Council on Social Work Education’s Council on Environmental Justice
and Human Rights.
Liz Montegary | Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Liz Montegary is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Broadly speaking, her research and teaching focus on queer cultural studies and transnational American studies. She is the author of Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families (Rutgers, 2018) and co-editor of the collection Mobile Desires: The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice (Palgrave, 2015). Her work on LGBT social movements; neoliberal cultural politics; militarization and securitization; and mobility, dis/ability, and the family has appeared in GLQ, WSQ, Signs, and Cultural Studies as well as edited book collections. More recently, she has published essays on the institutionalization of gender and sexuality studies on her campus and recent rightwing attacks on the field across the United States in Feminist Formations, The Scholar and Feminist Online, and The Abusable Past (Radical History Review’s blog). As an inaugural fellow for AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (2023-25), she has focused her campus organizing and professional service around developing anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian feminist approaches to conceptualizing and fighting for academic freedom.
Linda O’Keeffe | Professor, Department of Art
Professor Linda O'Keeffe, a prominent figure in sonic arts, leads initiatives at the crossroads of art, science, technology, and community. As the founder of Women in Sound Women on Sound (WISWOS), she champions women in sonic arts and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Interference Journal, emphasizing audio cultures, from 2012 to 2022.
In her collaborative work with the artist collective Non Random, she focuses on art-science partnerships, notably in "Evolving Ourselves with Unnatural Selection," an arts-based project addressing climate adaptation and the ethical dimensions of gene editing. Her acclaimed "Hybrid Soundscapes I-IV," created for the "Sounds Like Her" exhibition, explores the environmental impact of renewable technologies on soundscapes and communities.
Recipient of the Arts Council of England's travel award in 2018 to engage with women working in Sound across Brazil and Latin America resulted in multiple albums and co-authoring "The Body in Sound, Music, and Performance" (2022) with Professor Isabel Nogueira. Recent projects include a commissions for the Huddersfield Holocaust museum, a residency at the Ceramic House, Brighton, and a commission for Wexford Art Centre, Ireland 2024.
Her artistic contributions span sound installations, performances, soundscape studies, and collaborations with radio, dance, and public installations. Professor O'Keeffe is dedicated to supervising graduate students in interdisciplinary practice, community-engaged research, sound studies, sound art, performance art, and gender studies. Her mentorship combines academic research with practical artistic exploration, catering to the diverse interests of students in sonic arts.
Joseph Pierce | Associate Professor, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature
Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025) and Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019), and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) and the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” He has published work in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Latin American Research Review, and Art Journal, and in popular outlets including Hyperallergic, TruthOut, and Indian Country Today. With S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds, and in 2024-2025 he was a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He is a citizen of Cherokee Nation.
Michael Rubenstein | Professor, Department of English
Michael Rubenstein specializes in post-1945 Anglophone literature and culture; Irish Modernism; James Joyce; Film; and the Environmental Humanities. His most recent book, Modernism and Its Environments (London Bloomsbury, 2020), was co-authored with Justin Neuman. His previous book, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame: 2010), received the Modernist Studies Association Prize for Best Book of 2010 and the American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize for a Book on Literature. He is co-editor, with Sophia Beal and Bruce Robbins, of a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on "Infrastructuralism" (2015). His current project, Life Support: Fictions of Energy and Environment, examines the figure of the pipeline (aqueducts, transmission lines, and oil pipelines) in a selection of postwar Anglophone film and fiction. At Stony Brook he teaches classes in “British Cinema,” “The New Hollywood,” “Irish Modernism,” “Empire and Global English,” and “Energy Humanities.” Rubenstein currently serves as the Director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook.
Matthew Salzano | Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, School of Communication and Journalism
Matthew Salzano studies how people affect technology – and how technology affects people – in communication practices like public argument, debate, and protest. Salzano's critical research interrogates new media technologies like Generative Artificial Intelligence alongside user practices and cultural trends that threaten to limit possibilities for democratic engagement. His forthcoming book project, Just Participating: Formatting Critical Sensibilities When There's Just Too Much, reformats our understanding of participation for digital media and offers new strategies for intersectional social change.
Christopher Sellers | Professor, Department of History
Christopher Sellers is a historian with a long-standing interest in the environmental, cultural, and health history of the 20th- and 21st-century United States, and the ways this history has compared with that of other parts of the world. His research concentrates on the history of occupational and environmental health, of cities and suburbs, of industrial development and its hazards, and of the historical relationships between environmental politics, inequality, and democracy. Chris is co-editor of Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World and author of Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in 20th-Century America, Race and the Greening of Atlanta; Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis, as well as a forthcoming history of the lead and petrochemical industries in Texas and Mexico. Co-founder and Policy Monitoring and Interviewing co-lead of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, he is also a trained physician.
Karina Yager | Associate Professor, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences
Dr. Yager’s research is focused on the social and ecological impacts of climate change in the Andes of South America. Her transdisciplinary research examines coupled social ecological systems (SES) and land cover land use change (LCLUC) in mountain environments, combining remote sensing analysis, alpine vegetation studies, peatland research, and ethnographic fieldwork with indigenous pastoralists. Yager’s current projects are focused on the impact of disappearing tropical glaciers on pastoral agriculture and water resources, as well as deciphering the climate and societal drivers of peatland dynamics and land cover change in the Andes.
Her recent research is funded by the NASA LCLUC ROSES program, CONICYT (La Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica, Chile), and the National Geographic Society. She has been part of the GLORIA (Global Observation and Research Initiative in Alpine Environments) network in South America since 2002. Dr. Yager is currently the director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) at Stony Brook University.