HWW Announces 2023-2024 Alumni Board Members
As current board members, these individuals will spend the next year consulting with the HWW PI and staff on future workshop designs and other programming. Congratulations to all!
Meet the Board
Meghan Forbes holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, she works as a gardener by day and a freelance writer, translator, editor, and curator by night. Her research focuses on art and literature production in Central Europe between the two World Wars.
Blanca Garcia-Barron is currently a Library Technician at Mt. San Jacinto Community College in Riverside County, California and a graduate student in the MLIS program at San José State University. She earned her M.A. in borderlands history at The University of Texas, El Paso and holds a B.A. in public and oral history from the California State University, San Bernardino. Blanca was a Career Diversity Fellow with the American Historical Society from 2018 to 2020 and a Humanities Without Walls Fellow in 2019. She is also a Kaleidoscope Program Scholar (2022-2024) with the Association of Research Libraries. Her current studies focus on archival practices and theory, digital preservation, and critical librarianship. Pivoting from the history field to academic librarianship, Blanca found a renewed sense of self and a place where her advocacy of BIPOC students is central to her practice.
Nushelle de Silva Nushelle de Silva received her PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022. She holds a SMArchS, also from MIT, and a BA in Architecture from Princeton University.
Her work is broadly concerned with how culture is defined and deployed to further imperialism in the present. Past research topics include U.S. industrial exhibits selling capitalist development in non-aligned countries, dubious museum policies for accruing and disposing of collections, distortions of heritage discourse to maintain ethnic hegemony, and the institutionalization of counter-culture movements to majoritarian ends.
Her dissertation, "Moving Experiences: Traveling Museum Exhibitions and the Infrastructures of Cultural Globalization," examines how the ambitions of international organizations dedicated to cultural peacebuilding spatially reorganized museums to prioritize object exchange through traveling exhibitions in the mid-twentieth century, and argues that the uneven globalization facilitated by these exhibitions still augments rather than alleviates the coloniality of museums.
Her doctoral research has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Design History Society, among others.
Sara B.T. Thiel is an associate editor for Built In’s Expert Contributor Network. She joined the company in 2021, having previously managed adult education programs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater from 2018-2021. Currently, she manages and develops content for Built In’s Tech A-Z. Dr. Thiel holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and has taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois.
Sebastian Williams earned his PhD in English from Purdue University in 2021. Currently, he is an assistant professor of English at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia, where he participates in programs such as Upward Bound to mentor first-generation students in Appalachia. Previously, Sebastian worked in digital marketing and academic publishing; his experience informs his emphasis on public-facing education and research within the humanities, particularly service learning, community engagement, and the digital humanities. He was a member of the 2019 Humanities Without Walls cohort and is now writing a book on community-based writing and literature pedagogy.