Our Team

Benjamin Reiss

Director

Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English

Benjamin Reiss is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English and Director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

Associate Director

Mae Velloso-Lyons is the Associate Director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and manages the Mellon-funded Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative.

Senior Program Coordinator

Kaelyn McAdams is the Senior Program Coordinator of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and manages events at the Fox Center.

Communications and Outreach Coordinator

Karl-Mary Akre is the Communications and Outreach Coordinator and creates and manages communications strategy for the Fox Center's programs and initiatives.

Humanities Pathways Fellow 26-27

Rachael Orbeta is the 2026-27 Fox Center Humanities Pathways Fellow and a 6th year PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at Emory University.

Christina Crawford

Masse-Martin NEH Professor of Art History

Christina Crawford's current book project Model Housing: Atlanta and the Foundation of American Public Housing Architecture and digital humanities project Atlanta Housing Interplay investigates international transfer of ideas about social housing using the first federally-funded housing projects in the US—Atlanta's University and Techwood Homes (1933-37).

Professor of Comparative Literature

Professor Goh is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject and his third monograph Living on after Failure is forthcoming with Duke University Press. His current research interests include World Literature, theorizing the Asian figure, and literary texts that problematize our relation with work.

Associate Professor of Religion

Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Religion (2019-2022)

Jim Hoesterey's research and teaching interests focus in Islam, media, and politics. He is currently leading a large research project on diplomacy, soft power, and the making of "moderate Islam" in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia.

Divisional Dean of Arts

Senior Associate Dean of Faculty, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Music

As Divisional Dean of Arts, director of Emory Arts, and co-director of the Emory Arts & Social Justice program, Kevin works across the campus and the region to connect individuals and groups through artistic work and the conversations it sparks, focusing intently on issues of social justice, civil and human rights, and buried or forgotten histories.

Betty Gage Holland Professor of Roman History

Director of the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program

Jinyu Liu is the author of the monograph Collegia Centonariorum: The Guilds of Textile Dealers in the Roman West (Brill, 2009). Her research interests include social relations in Roman cities, the non-elite in the Roman Empire, Latin epigraphy, the reception of Graeco-Roman classics in China, as well as translating classical texts in a global context.

Professor of Hebrew Bible

Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program

Dr. Roger S. Nam joined Candler after serving as dean and professor of biblical studies at Portland Seminary at George Fox University in Oregon. Nam focuses his research on the economies of the ancient Near East and the book of Ezra-Nehemiah.

Associate Professor of English

Dan Sinykin is the author of American Literature and the Long Downturn, Big Fiction, and, with Johanna Winant, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century. He is working on a manuscript about the rise of, and alternatives to, Zionism in the Pale of Settlement.

Associate Professor of Spanish

Laura Torres-Rodríguez specializes in Mexican literature, culture, and intellectual history; Asian-Latin American Studies; Puerto Rican literature, art, and thought; and disability studies. She is currently working on a second book that explores the development of public discourse on autism in Puerto Rico's colonial context from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

Emory University College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English

Michelle Wright's research focuses on the creation and reinvention of Black identities from the Enlightenment to the present day in the Anglophone, francophone and Germanophone African Diasporas.

Associate Professor of Film and Media

Gregory Zinman's research and curatorial work bridges the fields of film studies, media studies, and art history. He is the author of Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts and the curator of Off The Wall @ 725 Ponce, a public screening program in Atlanta.

Our Team

Benjamin Reiss

Director

Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English

Mae Velloso-Lyons

Associate Director

Kaelyn McAdams

Senior Program Coordinator

Karl-Mary Akre

Communications and Outreach Coordinator

Rachael Orbeta

Humanities Pathways Fellow 26-27

2026-2027 FCHI Executive Committee

Christina Crawford

Masse-Martin NEH Professor of Art History

Irving Goh

Professor of Comparative Literature

Jim Hoesterey

Associate Professor of Religion

Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Religion (2019-2022)

Kevin Karnes

Divisional Dean of Arts

Senior Associate Dean of Faculty, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Music

Jinyu Liu

Betty Gage Holland Professor of Roman History

Director of the Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program

Roger S. Nam

Professor of Hebrew Bible

Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program

Dan Sinykin

Associate Professor of English

Laura Torres-Rodríguez

Associate Professor of Spanish

Michelle Wright

Emory University College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English

Gregory Zinman

Associate Professor of Film and Media

The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry