Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Hannah Chazin is an archaeologist whose work investigates the history of human-animal relations, and explores how new scientific techniques like isotope analysis and ancient DNA analysis are re-shaping how archaeologists learn about life in the past. 

Currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Chazin’s book, Live Stock and Dead Things, was released in 2024 to critical acclaim. Yannis Hamilakis, professor of archaeology and of modern Greek studies at Brown University, states "We have been waiting for a book like this for many years... this is a rare bird of a book that pays our dues to the mundane beings that lived and labored with and alongside humans, but which were instrumentalized and objectified in scholarship for far too long." 

Chazin's scholarship has appeared in American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Archaeometry, and the Journal of Field Archaeology. In support of her scholarship, she has received fellowships and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study. Previously, she has done archaeological fieldwork in Armenia, Russia, Chile, Cambodia, and the western United States.

Chazin received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently the co-director of the Karashamb Animals Project, which is exploring, using cutting-edge scientific analyses, the lives of the animals buried in an ancient necropolis in Armenia.

Gastón Enrique Espinosa is the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.  He is a graduate of Princeton (M.Div.), Harvard (M.Ed.), and UC Santa Barbara (Ph.D.) and did postdoctoral work at the UCLA School of Film and Television. 

Espinosa has held visiting fellow appointments at Dartmouth College, NHC National Institute for Advanced Studies, the University of Münster, Germany, and Princeton University. He has directed nine major surveys on Latino religions, politics, and activism from 1998-2022. 

Espinosa is the author or co-author of nine books, fifty refereed articles, book chapters, and reviews, sixty encyclopedia entries, 200 scholarly keynotes and presentations around the world, has made numerous television, radio, and media appearances, and has served as the director of eight major conferences. 

In 2002, he spoke at the National Hispanic Presidential Prayer Breakfast with President George Bush and Senator Joseph Lieberman and he currently is the co-director of the Columbia University Press Series in Religion and Politics.

Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind is an international figure in architecture and urban design. Informed by a deep commitment to music, philosophy, and literature, Libeskind aims to create architecture that is resonant, original, and sustainable.

Libeskind established his architectural studio, Studio Libeskind, in Berlin, Germany, in 1989 after winning the competition to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin. In February 2003, Studio Libeskind moved its headquarters from Berlin to New York City to oversee the master plan for the World Trade Center redevelopment, which is being realized in Lower Manhattan.

Libeskind’s practice is involved in designing and realizing a diverse array of urban, cultural, and commercial projects around the globe. The Studio has completed buildings that range from museums and concert halls to convention centers, university buildings, hotels, shopping centers, and residential towers. As Principal Design Architect for Studio Libeskind, Libeskind speaks widely on the art of architecture in universities and professional summits. His architecture and ideas have been the subject of many articles and exhibitions, influencing the field of architecture and the development of cities and culture.

Libeskind has won dozens of awards for his work including the Goethe Medal, the Hiroshima Peace Prize, the Dresden Peace Prize, and the European Union Prize for Civil Rights.

Mr. Libeskind's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Office and the President's Leadership Fund.

Photo credit: Stefan Ruiz

Robert Twomey is an artist and engineer studying the ways we share space with machines—creative, perceptual, emotional—and how emerging technologies transform sites of intimate life. He houses this work in the Machine Cohabitation Lab. His projects have been presented at SIGGRAPH (Best Paper Award), CVPR, NeurIPS, ISEA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. He has been an artist-in-residence with Nokia Bell Labs’ Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Carnegie Mellon’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and a NYC Media Lab x Bertelsmann fellow. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, California Arts Council, Microsoft, Amazon, HP, and NVIDIA. Twomey holds a BS from Yale with majors in Art and Biomedical Engineering, an MFA from UC San Diego, and a PhD from the University of Washington. He is a professor of Computing in the Arts and a researcher with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.

Professor Twomey's Athenaeum presentation is the keynote for Third Annual Meeting of the World Imagination Network.