Every academic year, the COE invites a small group of Wesleyan faculty and undergraduate students, plus a noted scholar from outside the University, to gather together for the Think Tank: a yearlong discussion of a critical environmental issue. The 2024-2025 Bailey COE Think Tank feature Sonia Sultan, Alan M. Dachs Professor of Science, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies; Justine Quijada, Associate Professor of Religion, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and Environmental Studies; and Garry Bertholf, Assistant Professor of African American Studies, alongside undergraduates Maryam Badr ’25, Hannah Podol ’25, and Nic Galleno, ’25. These University fellows will be joined by the 2024-2025 Menakka and Essel Bailey ‘66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar Roxy Coss: Jazz saxophonist and Founding President of the Women In Jazz Organization, as well as a Grammy-award winning musician, composer, educator and activist.
Titled “Agency: Affect and Action,” the 2024-2025 COE Think Tank revolves around theorizing agency across the human, non-human, and environmental realms. The group will delve into the common presumption that human beings are the only agents with the ability and power to act or change the conditions of climate change, reckoning with the idea that everything on the planet affects all of the conditions and beings around it. Exposing the limited conception of “personhood” in Western epistemologies, the Think Tank is particularly interested in broader definitions of the “person” that include entities like rivers, mountains, and trees, as well as Black, LGBTQ, and historically suppressed human communities. On a backdrop of contemporary environmental crises, the Think Tank seeks to explore what possibilities might emerge if we reimagine the boundary between an “object” and an “agent”: How do current socio-political, cultural, artistic, and biological theories of agency limit the futures we can imagine and the actions we can take to bring them into being?
Per tradition, the 2024-2025 COE Think Tank is multidisciplinary in nature, bridging conversation between the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. As the Think Tank fellows engage in meaningful dialogues and research projects, they will situate the COE in a long lineage of academics, artists, writers, and activists helping the Wesleyan community to reflect on and imagine this question of contemporary agency.
Maryam Badr ’25
Maryam became interested in the COE Think Tank through discussions with Professor Sonia Sultan about the importance of agency in scientific research and public health policy. Historically, genes have led scientific inquiry, leaving the role of the environment largely unexplored or under-examined. As a pre-med neuroscience and College of East Asian Studies double-major, Maryam’s senior capstone project explores global conceptualizations of eldercare, particularly how it exposes dangerous weaknesses in healthcare systems, welfare programs, and family policies. The question of agency is integral to the construction of eldercare, pushing notions of whose body is worthy of care, healing, and respect.
Roxy Coss
2024-2025 Menakka and Essel Bailey ‘66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar
Grammy-winning musician, composer, educator and activist Roxy Coss has become one of the most unique and innovative saxophonists on the scene. She is the founder and president of Women In Jazz Organization (WIJO), co-artistic director of the Brubeck Jazz Summit, and visiting fellow for the Think Tank at Wesleyan University’s Bailey College of the Environment ‘24-’25. Starting in September ‘25, Roxy will be joining Stony Brook University as Assistant Professor/Director of Jazz Studies.
Garry Bertholf
Assistant Professor of African American Studies
The Black Charismatic: Affective Politics and Political Agency in the Post-Civil Rights Era
Professor Bertholf’s teaching and research focus on Africana literature and literary criticism, critical theory, and Black intellectual history––all of which will inform his contributions to the COE Think Tank. His research project will generalize out from Tavis Smiley’s yearly “State of the Black Union” address, examining the practice of affective or “charismatic” Black political leadership and popular culture to form broader conclusions about the new liberalism of Black politics and the current crisis of the Black public intellectual in the post-civil rights era.
Nic Galleno ’25
Nic became interested in the COE Think Tank when Professor Garry Bertholf, another fellow, shared the theme. He had previously engaged with agency in a few courses, namely in relation to Saidiya Hartman’s work in Scenes of Subjection on refusal and Derrida’s theorization of the sovereign position in The Beast and the Sovereign. As an English major pursuing an honors thesis project, Nic is excited to discuss agency in a broader context with the Think Tank fellows. His thesis will attempt to build toward a post-structuralist reading, departing from Hortense Spillers, of moments in Saidiya Hartman and Ocean Vuong’s work, although he is interested in incorporating aspects of the sonic and environmental.
Hannah Podol ’25
As a double major in anthropology and environmental studies, Hannah came to the COE Think Tank in order to ground her research in thinking across disciplines. In her senior thesis, she is planning to explore the ways in which a community in the Ecuadorian Amazon uses agency in transforming their relationship to land and to their potential imagined futures. Agency and improvisation are such energizing vehicles of dialogue to think alongside fellow students and professors.
Justine Quijada
Associate Professor of Religion, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and Environmental Studies
Not All Rocks: How Indigenous Ritual Enables us to Rethink Agency
As a veteran of the COE Think Tank, Professor Quijada will approach the 2024-2025 Think Tank upon the backdrop of her work into the history of animism. She hopes to further question how current Western conceptions of animacy developed: How did Westerners come to define personhood? What consequences does this have for knowing the world around us? Why is this distinction so imbued with affect and emotion? Combining this history with contemporary indigenous and feminist critiques of science, Professor Quijada also plans to conduct fieldwork with a Gaian group and local New Age shamans to explore the types of relationships that people can imagine with the world around them.
Sonia Sultan
Alan M. Dachs Professor of Science, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies
Shifting Views of Biological Agency: From Genes to Organisms
Professor Sultan is an evolutionary ecologist who studies the interplay of genetic and environmental factors in biological inheritance and individual development. As part of the COE Think Tank this year, she will be researching adaptive plasticity: the capacity of living organisms to adjust development, physiology, and behavior in response to their external and internal environmental conditions, potentially inverting the long-accepted role of an organism’s genome as its “master molecule” of biological agency.