Participants
Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro (she/zie)
Keynote speaker
Rutgers University—Newark, History, American Studies, & Africana Studies
Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro (she/zie) is a scholar, artist, and organizer, and the child of a Kenyan-South Asian immigrant and a white descendant of several members of the genocidal Mayflower colony. She is currently Assistant Professor of History, American Studies, and Africana Studies at Rutgers‒Newark; director of The Museum On Site; and co-convener with aAliy Muhammad of Finding Ceremony. Her work focuses on the uses of the past in public culture (including her award-winning Hamilton essay); and on the concrete decolonization of museums and landscapes. She is currently writing two books, UnCollect Our Ancestors: Finding Ceremony and the Descendant Community Struggle for the Return of the Penn Museum’s Morton Cranial Collection (under contract with Penn Press), designed to support the many descendants of the ancestors whose remains are held in that collection; and Liberation Archaeology, which offers people of color raised in US education systems an alternative approach to engaging with their pasts. She tweets at @intersectionist.
Trinity Roche (she/her)
University of Toronto
Trinity Roche is a Masters of Science candidate in Evolutionary/Forensic Anthropology with a specific focus on juvenile osteology. She aims to utilize well-rounded approaches, informed by her forensic anthropology specialization, undergraduate degree in sociocultural anthropology, and her engagement with interdisciplinary events and research. She tweets at @early_sunsetsss.
Rose Bryson (she/her)
University of Florida
Rose Bryson is an anthropologist. Her work centers around skeletal bioethics, particularly within legacy anatomical collections and digitized biological material. She currently works in NAGPRA repatriation, and her research focuses on innovating novel subadult age estimation methods for forensic identification and repatriation.
Sean Purcell (he/him)
Indiana University
Sean Purcell is a PhD candidate at Indiana University's Media School and Digital Health Humanities Coordinator at the University of California San Francisco Library. The 2023 Helfand Fellow at the New York Academy of Medicine, his work engages and critiques the ways human subjects have been turned into research objects in the history of medicine.
Anna Marie Schuldt (she/her)
Simmons University
Anna Marie Schuldt is a Master of Library and Information Science candidate with a concentration in Archives Management at Simmons University. She is also the Assistant at the Waring Historical Library, the special collections and university archives of the Medical University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on documenting the occurrence of human remains in archival collections, examining local policies governing their treatment, and exploring the ethical dilemma surrounding their presence within such collections.
Isis Dwyer
University of Florida
Isis Dwyer is a Ph.D. Candidate in biological anthropology at the University of Florida. Her dissertation research centers a bioethnography of craniofacial variation in contemporary African American and Afro-Caribbean populations towards improved understandings of biosocial diversity in Black populations, and better standards of forensic identification for undocumented Black decedents. Her research interests includes population variation in contemporary Black populations, ethical curation and use of human remains in education and research, public anthropology and science communication, and the interactions of language and forensic constructions of race and human variation.
Keesha Ha (she/her)
Journalist
Keesha Ha was an Assistant Professor of Communications at Rowan College of South Jersey for 12 years before launching her media watchdog blog BmoreProjects.blog in 2016 to amplify the increased public scrutiny of deaths at the hands of law enforcement. She is a frequent contributor to the Baltimore Sun’s editorial pages on the topics of media analysis, public history, and Johns Hopkins. The National Public History Council as well as the Organizational of American Historians selected Keesha as a panelist for their April 2024 annual conferences where she will examine Johns Hopkins’ mythical narrative as an abolitionist. She is currently writing a book about the historical impact clandestine experiments at Johns Hopkins medical school have had on Blacks in the community. She tweets at @bmoreprojects.
Dr. Aja Marie Lans
Keynote speaker
Johns Hopkins University
Aja Lans is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in anthropology and Africana studies. Lans’s research integrates Black feminist and decolonizing theory into bioarchaeological investigations while questioning the ethics of curating human remains in university and museum collections.
Nina Schreiner (she/her)
SC Institute of Archaeology & Anthropology and Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina
Nina is the NAGPRA Coordinator at the SC Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. Her dissertation research mobilizes critical collection itineraries alongside frameworks of settler colonialism and assemblage thought to understand the history and legacies of archaeology in the Eastern U.S.
Dr. Julie Lemmon (she/her)
Johns Hopkins University
Julie Lemmon is a physician in private practice and a Master's student in the JHU online History of Medicine Program. As a pathologist, her daily work involves examining (modern) anatomic specimens in service of making diagnoses—a skillset derived from training that relied on modern and historic teaching specimens. As a student of the history of medicine, she is focused on exploring the tension between historic preservation versus the growing imperative to honor and/or repatriate individuals who had no choice in their subjugation as a museum specimen. She tweets at @jwlemmonmd.
Dr. Jennifer Gonissen (she/her)
Université Libre de Bruxelles
A Belgian art historian and archaeologist, Jennifer specializes in forensic anthropology, human anatomy, and the history of anatomical collections. With a PhD in Biomedical Sciences, her research at the University of Brussels focuses on documenting human remains, particularly those with colonial backgrounds. She examines their origins, investigates their biological characteristics, and explores the ethical implications of their inclusion in academic collections. Her research aims to inform historical narratives and addresses the complexities of collection and preservation of human remains.
Jessica Leigh Hester (she/her)
Organizer
Johns Hopkins University
Jessica Leigh Hester is a science journalist and historian. She is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins, studying grave-robbing, dissection, medical education, citizenship and civic and political organizing, and the long and contested afterlives of medical specimens made from coopted human remains in the Eastern United States from 19th century to the present. She is committed to public history, digital humanities, and community work. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, The Atlantic, CityLab, Atlas Obscura, and more. Her second book, about trace fossils, is forthcoming from Random House. She (occasionally) tweets at @jessicahester.
Adam Ross (he/him)
University College London
Adam Ross is a MSc student studying Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology at University College London. He curated the exhibit The Craft of Exposure: Evolving Methods and Mindsets in Visualizing the Human Body at the Old Red Medical Museum in Galveston, Texas, where he also worked to preserve and catalogue the collection of historic human remains at the University of Texas Medical Branch. His current work is focused on the ways historic legislation related to medical ethics in the United Kingdom have changed approaches to the acquisition and release of human remains in the 19th and 18th centuries, specifically from a bioarchaeological approach. His work has also touched on issues related to the historic abuse of Freedman communities in Texas and the potential for reclaiming medico-legal documentation that might provide insight into the lifeways of people that lived in these communities.
Contact participants here with questions, comments, and suggestions about their work.