Executive Committee

Humanities Institute Executive Committee

2020-21 Committee Members

James Currie

Associate Professor of Music
James Currie is a writer, performer, and Associate Professor in the Department of Music, where he teaches music history to undergraduates, and seminars on the interactions between music and philosophy at the graduate level. He is also a faculty member of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. His academic work takes place at the points of intersection between music history, aesthetic formalism, politics and non-academic written forms, and he is presently at work on a book in praise of boundaries and closure, entitled “Temenos: Boundaries of Musical Life.” Outside of the academy he has been active as a performance artist and writer, and in recent years has worked on a number of operatic collaborations with composers for commissions from, amongst others, Radio France, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and IRCAM at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Details>>

Lindsay Brandon Hunter

Assistant Professor of Theatre & Dance
Lindsay Brandon Hunter holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU and a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA, where she was awarded a 2012 teaching fellowship from the Colloquium of University Teaching Fellows and the 2011 Aaron Curtis Taylor Memorial Scholarship.  Her current research project focuses on performances of authenticity and realness in intermedial theater, reality television, and immersive and pervasive gaming.  Her published work includes a chapter on alternate reality gaming in the forthcoming Framing Immersive Theatre and Performance (Palgrave) and essays and reviews in Text & Presentation and Theatre Survey.  She is also a past editor of UCLA’s Extensions: The Online Journal of Embodiment and Technology. Details>>

Hal Langfur

Associate Professor of History
Dr. Langfur focuses on the history of Brazil, Latin America, and the Atlantic world with an emphasis on race relations; comparative indigenous, frontier, and borderlands histories; colonial violence; state territorialization projects; and conquest and colonization narratives. He is the author of The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750 – 1830 (2006) and the editor of Native Brazil: Beyond the Convert and the Cannibal, 1500 – 1900 (2014). Details>>

Ruth Mack

Associate Professor of English
Bio forthcoming. Details>>

John Opera

Assistant Professor of Art

In his photo-based work, John Opera combines a deep interest in the visual characteristics of natural and scientific phenomena with a rigorous experimental approach to the techniques and apparatuses by which photographs have been defined and produced. Opera often returns to antiquated—but by no means exhausted—photographic tools and processes, including pinhole imaging, and more recently the cyanotype and anthotype.

He earned his BFA from SUNY New Paltz (1998) and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005). He lived, worked, taught, and exhibited in Chicago for more than a dozen years. Opera joined the University at Buffalo in 2017. Details>>

Katja Praznik

Associate Professor of Arts Management

Katja Praznik holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Ljubljana. She teaches courses related to the political economy of the arts, cultural policy, and research in the field of arts management. She is the author of The Paradox of Unpaid Artistic Labor: Autonomy of Art, the Avant-Garde and Cultural Policy in the Transition to Post-Socialism (Ljubljana: Sophia, 2016) and Art Work: Invisible Labor and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (forthcoming with University of Toronto Press). Praznik held an HI Faculty Fellowship in 2016-17. Details>>

Camilo Trumper

Associate Professor of History
Photo and bio forthcoming. Details>>

Ex officio Members

David Castillo

Director, Professor of Spanish, Romance Languages and Literatures

Christina Milletti

Executive Director, Associate Professor of English