The Master’s in Integrative Studies, focused in Public Humanities, explores the humanities and contemporary human experience through the lens of race, social justice, democracy, and decolonial curatorial and knowledge practices. The program is designed to collapse the dichotomy between the languages of practice and scholarship through the creation of an integrated interdisciplinary curriculum incorporating both theory and practice, linking current academic debates to conversations taking place in museums and other cultural institutions.

Join us in celebrating the Simmons Center’s first graduating cohort of Public Humanities Students!

Florence Blackwell

Florence Blackwell is a scholar and curator born and raised in Philadelphia, PA. Her Master’s thesis “The Newport Rebel Jazz Festival: Black Music, Collective Resistance, and Jim Crow in Rhode Island,” incorporates novel archival research undertaken as a fellow at the Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History at the Newport Historical Society. In Fall 2026, she will begin doctoral studies in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where she will expand her practice as a cultural producer and writer and will research Black aesthetic practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, queer and trans creative practices, and alternative archives and museums.

Claire Inouye

As a Public Humanities Master’s student at Brown University, Claire has focused on digital storytelling, oral history, and community-engaged research. Her capstone project, “Nuibari,” is a digital oral history space where individuals of Japanese ancestry share stories centered on memory, identity, and intergenerational experience. The project brings together seven video interviews alongside multimedia materials, inviting visitors to explore how personal histories connect to broader Japanese and Japanese American life across generations and places. Rather than a static archive, “Nuibari” is designed to feel open and ongoing, a space for reflection, recognition, and dialogue.

Her coursework in curatorial practice, oral history methods, and digital humanities has shaped how she approaches storytelling across institutional contexts. As a Marketing and Outreach Fellow at the Brown Arts Institute, she has produced content, conducted interviews, and mentored a student team across two years. She has also contributed to public education initiatives as an Education Fellow at the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Her summer practicum at Providence Preservation Society further deepened her archival research and narrative writing skills across unfamiliar histories.

Christina Young

Christina Young (A.M., Public Humanities, Brown) is an artist, curator, and researcher interested in experimental art and curatorial practices that challenge power and advance relational epistemologies. During her time at Brown, she worked cross-departmentally between the Public Humanities program, History of Art and Architecture, and Modern Culture and Media. As a Curatorial Fellow for Brown Arts Institute, she supported programming for “ojo|-|ólǫ́,” a solo exhibition by Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege, and produced and curated “The Sun Has Its Own Drum,” a 2025 Cohen Gallery exhibition featuring four Northeast-based artists whose work explores the proliferation of Indigenous worldviews and values through sound.

Her Master’s thesis, "And Now, a Return to Ourselves: Collective and Research-Based Practices of the Group Fwomajé in Late Twentieth-Century Martinique," traces the history of the artist research group Fwomajé and their contributions to emerging theories of post-colonialism, hybridity, and diaspora. During her RISD Museum Summer practicum, her archival research on Wifredo Lam's painting “Près des Îles Vierges” was published on the museum's digital publications platform as “Troubled Earth.” While at Brown, she wove painting, performance, digital intervention, and archival engagement to surface what exceeds the limits of digital technology — the supernatural, the somatic, and the erased — while exposing the labor and power that underwrite its seductive ease.

Ray Zhang

Ray Zhang is a second-year Public Humanities student at the Simmons Center at Brown University, graduating this May. He holds a B.A. in History and Museum Studies from Colgate University, where he first began exploring the role of public history and collective memory in exhibition spaces.

At Brown, Ray's research examines how public history shapes collective memory, with a particular focus on museums and archives as sites of community meaning-making. During his internship with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. last summer, he engaged in exhibition interpretation and cultural preservation in the public space. Following his passion for photography and digital humanities, Ray’s capstone project, “The Bell Over Chinatown,” traces the evolution of Chinatowns across the United States, exploring how these spaces embody resilience, adaptation, and ongoing cultural preservation. Through digital humanities platforms, Ray is committed to documenting the lived experiences of the Chinese diaspora, amplifying underrepresented voices, and building connections across communities.