Humanities Institute at Stony Brook Leadership

 

Michael Rubenstein Director

Michael Rubenstein is Professor in English Department specializing in post-1945 Anglophone literature and culture; Irish Modernism; James Joyce; Film; and the Environmental Humanities. His most recent book is Pipeline Noir: Seeing Oil through Chinatown (University of Minnesota Press, 2025). His other books include Modernism and Its Environments (London Bloomsbury, 2020), co-authored with Justin Neuman and  Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame: 2010), which 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. He teaches classes in “British Cinema,” “The New Hollywood,” “Irish Modernism,” “Empire and Global English,” and “Energy Humanities.”

Erika Supria Honisch Associate Director

Erika Supria Honisch (PhD, University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of Critical Music Studies in the Music Department and Affiliate Faculty in the History Department. Specializing in co-existence and conflict in the early modern world, she uses music and sound to provide new answers to longstanding historical and historiographical questions. Her articles appear in Journal of Musicology,  Common Knowledge, Music & Letters,  and Austrian History Yearbook, among others, and she sits on the editorial boards of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. A champion of inclusivity in the academy, her work is informed by her South Asian and German roots. In 2022, she received the Stony Brook CAS Godfrey Award for Excellence in Teaching.  

 Adrienne Unger Program Coordinator

Adrienne Unger received her BA in English/Creative Writing and Literature from Long Island University-Southampton Campus, and her MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Previously, she was the Administrative Coordinator at the Creative Writing and Literature program at Stony Brook Southampton. Her work for other organizations includes stints at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre Foundation of Maryland, the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, the Kennedy-Krieger Institute and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She was a Washington, DC staff reporter for Crain Communications Inc.’s Business Insurance Magazine and was a freelance writer for various publications including Jubilee, Black Engineers and NSBE Magazine. Adrienne’s poetry, essays and reviews have been published in several literary journals including The Southampton Review, Chautauqua, Mystery Tribune, Harvard Review Online,  FLARE: The Flagler Review, Oberon,  Alehouse, Linden Avenue Journal, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Passager,  The Scene and Heard and Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine.

Hannah Waterman Graduate Assistant

Hannah Waterman is a Ph.D candidate in Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University. Her dissertation, “Imaginary Sound Worlds in Early Modern Scientific Thought,” examines how sonic imagination shaped scientific inquiry in the seventeenth century, tracing intersections between music, natural philosophy, and emerging theories of perception. Her research draws on archival sources, the history of science, and historical sound studies to illuminate the role of auditory speculation in early modern epistemologies. Outside of her academic work, she is an active performer on the Baroque cello. 

Jesus-Jimenez-Valdes IDEA Grad

Jesus Jimenez Valdes is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University, specializing in eighteenth-century Spanish-American travel writing. In his dissertation, he is examining the tensions between scientific observation and imperial politics in Enlightenment scientific expeditions. He has presented his research at conferences including LASA, NeMLa, and IILI. His research has been supported by competitive fellowships including the IDEA Grad fellowship, which enabled his collaboration with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, the Guiliano Fellowship for international archival research, and LACS research grants. He co-edited a special issue on printed news in the Hispanic Monarchy (2021) and organized a three-part lecture series featuring leading scholars Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Mariselle Meléndez in 2023.