Authors
People who write for Public Books.
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Alejandro Zuleta
Alejandro Zuleta (he/him) is a choral-theater composer and conductor exploring the intersection of music, culture, and power. He directs Music at Co-Cath (MACC). Power & Sound is his monthly essay on music, culture, and politics.
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Cal Biruk
Cal Biruk is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Their research interests include medical anthropology, STS, queer studies, and critical data studies. They are the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (2018, Duke) and the co-author, with Greta LaFleur, of a book titled Birding as…
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Paul Michael Johnson
Paul Michael Johnson is associate research professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean (Toronto, 2021), in addition to scholarly and public-facing essays on such topics as the body, race, gender, translation, satire, popular media, and public…
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Sylvia Brownrigg
Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of seven acclaimed works of fiction, including The Delivery Room and Pages for You(winner of a Lambda award). Her middle-grade story Kepler’s Dream, published under the name Juliet Bell, was turned into a feature film. Sylvia’s recent memoir is The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found. Author photograph by Gina Logan.
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Shakti Jaising
Shakti Jaising is a professor of English and Film Studies at Drew University. She is the author of Beyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script and co-editor of Streaming Video in the Global South.
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Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra is associate professor of Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her publications include The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (2019) as well as several articles and essays. She is co-director of Global South Studies and a host at Novel Dialogue.
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Pasquale Toscano
Pasquale Toscano is an assistant professor of English at Vassar College, who previously studied Classics as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford. He has published essays on disability and culture in venues such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Hopkins Review, while his scholarship—on epic and Renaissance literature—has appeared in various journals and…
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Michael Knapp
Michael Knapp’s writing has appeared in n+1, Dissent, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He teaches at College of the Canyons.
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Hester Blum
Hester Blum is the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of several books about sailors’ literary culture and the editor of the Oxford edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (2022). She cohosts the Exploring Moby-Dick podcast with actor and writer Rob Delaney.
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Ashley D. Dennis
Ashley D. Dennis is an assistant professor of history and the public history coordinator at the College of Charleston.
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Quito Tsui
Quito Tsui is a PhD student in environmental social sciences at Stanford University, focusing on sustainable development after conflict. She leads the MERL Tech Initiative’s Humanitarian AI+MERL Working Group. Her latest book chapter, “The Logic of Biometrics and Organizational Accountability,” appears in Data Protection in Humanitarian Action: Responding to Crises in a Data-Driven World, ed.…
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Aaron Martin
Aaron Martin is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, researching data governance, digital identity, and technology regulation. He is a lead investigator at the Digital Sovereignty Observatory. His recent books include Transgressive Tech: The Privatization of the Public Interest, edited with Linnet Taylor et al. (Routledge, 2026) and Data Protection in Humanitarian Action:…
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Anna Pegler-Gordon
Anna Pegler-Gordon is Director of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program and Professor at the James Madison College of Michigan State University. She researches and teaches the history of immigration and citizenship policy, including especially Asian American history. Her current research explores Nikkei resistance outside of US concentration camps during World War II.
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Morgan E. Barry
Morgan E. Barry is an Assistant Editor at Public Books and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University. Her most recent published work, “SUBJECT’s Wife: The Racialized Gender Logics of Anticommunism and State Surveillance,” (Signs, 2023) examines how ideas about race, gender, and sexuality shaped surveillance and political repression in Cold…
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Beth Lew-Williams
Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. Her recent book, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law, won the Bancroft Prize in 2026.
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Catherine Gander
Catherine Gander’s books include the monograph Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection, the edited volume The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts, and the poetry pamphlet Matches. With Stefania Heim, she is co-editor of Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser. She is Associate Professor of American Literature at Maynooth University, Ireland.
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Wendy Pearlman
Wendy Pearlman is the Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author of six books, including We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017), The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (2024), and Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee…
