Scholar

Benjamin Piekut

Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University
Benjamin Piekut was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Amateurism Across the Arts Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 9, 2018.

Benjamin Piekut studied music and philosophy at Hampshire College before pursuing his M.A. in composition at Mills College, where he studied with Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. After a stint in the critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at Columbia University. His first monograph,...

Katie Peterson

Poet and Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at UC Davis
Katie Peterson gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2022, part of the Spring 2022 Flash Reading Series.

Katie Peterson is the author of Fog and Smoke, published by FSG in early 2024. Poems from the collection have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the Yale Review, among other publications. Her previous book, Life in a Field (2021) is a collaboration with the photographer Young Suh. She is the author of other books of poetry: This One Tree...

Brittany Perham

Author and Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University
Brittany Perham gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Brittany Perham's most recent book, Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She is also the author of The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP, 2016). Her...

Solveig Øvstebø

Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Astrup Fearnley Museet
Solveig Øvstebø was a Visiting Curator Panel Participant at the Feminist Curatorial Practices Roundtable Conversation at the Arts Research Center on April 11, 2018.

Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1973, Solveig Øvstebø undertook post-graduate studies in art history at the University of Bergen and was the former Director of Bergen Kunsthall, developing it into one of the main contemporary art institutions in Norway, with a focus on production, research and discourse.

She has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Looking is Political: Nairy Baghramian;...

Samuel Otter

Literary Critic, Professor of English at UC Berkeley
Samuel Otter was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Conjoined Histories Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 9, 2011.

Samuel Otter has taught in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley since 1990. He served as department chair from 2009 to 2012. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century United States literatures. He is particularly interested in the relationships between literature and history, the varieties of literary excess, and the ways in which close textual interpretation also can be deep and wide.

He...

Daniel O’Neill

ARC Fellow, Japanese Program Associate Professor, and Head Undergraduate Academic Advisor at UC Berkeley
Daniel O'Neill was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2018 – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Associate Professor Daniel O'Neill received his B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Yale University. He teaches courses in modern Japanese literature, cinema, and cultural history. His research interests include nonfiction and experimental media, the intersections of media theory and ecocriticism, the locations of disability in critical sexuality studies and the history of science and technology...

Matthew Olzmann

ARC Fellow and Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Dartmouth
Matthew Olzmann was an ARC Fellow in 2022 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative.

Matthew Olzmann was born in Detroit. He received a BA from the University of Michigan–Dearborn and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is the author of Constellation Route (Alice James Books, 2022); Contradictions in the Design (Alice James Books, 2016); and Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), winner of the 2011 Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Olzmann has received fellowships from the Kresge Arts...

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Poet and Professor of Poetry at UC Berkeley
Geoffrey G. O’Brien gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Experience in Groups (2018), People on Sunday (2013), Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (2002). His work is part of Three Poets...

Alva Noë

ARC Fellow, Philosopher, and Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley
Alva Noë was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2015 – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009...

Adam Nilsen

Senior Lecturer in the Lurie College of Education at San Jose State
Adam Nilsen gave a Visiting Scholar Lecture at the Arts Research Center on February 24, 2016.

Adam Nilsen was the head of education and interpretation at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education in 2015 in Learning Sciences and Technology Design. He holds a B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from New York University in Anthropology. His professional background is in museum education. As a researcher at the Oakland Museum of California, he curated exhibits with themes including migrant...