Chris Cynn, Ph.D.
Director, Health Humanities Lab
Co-director, East Marshall Street Well Oral History and Memorialization Project
Chris Cynn is the founder and director of the Health Humanities Lab in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Humanities Research Center and the co-director of the lab's East Marshall Street Oral History and Memorialization Project. She is also an associate professor in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, affiliated with the departments of African American Studies and English. She is the author of Prevention: Gender, Sexuality, HIV, and the Media in Côte d'Ivoire and has also co-edited a collection of essays on literary and visual representations of HIV/AIDS.
Michael Dickinson, Ph.D.
Co-director, East Marshall Street Well Oral History and Memorialization Project
Dr. Michael Dickinson is an associate professor of African American history at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research examines Black life and labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and throughout the African Diaspora. Dr. Dickinson is the author of Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic published in 2022 and awarded the Paul E. Lovejoy Book Prize for excellence and originality in slavery scholarship.
Daniel Sunshine
East Marshall Street Well Project Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-2024)
Daniel Sunshine was an East Marshall Street Well Project postdoctoral fellow (2022-2024) and remains a research affiliate of Virginia Commonwealth University. In the fall 2024, he began a postdoctoral fellowship in History at Tufts University, where he contributes to the Slavery, Colonialism, and their Legacies at Tufts initiative.. He earned his PhD from the University of Virginia. Currently, he is completing a book project entitled A Curse Upon Your Union: Crafting Black Freedom and Wartime Reconstruction in Appalachia.
Maggie Unverzagt Goddard, Ph.D.
East Marshall Street Well Project Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-2024)
In the fall 2024, Maggie Unverzagt Goddard started a position as an assistant professor of Museum Studies at the University of Kansas where her work focuses on the role of art and activism in reconfiguring sites of memorialization and on the use of curatorial strategies to represent and navigate complex histories. Her research has been published in Women & Performance, The Journal of Popular Culture and Fwd: Museums, and received awards from the Popular Culture Association and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.