Humanities Institute at Stony Brook Leadership

Michael Rubenstein Director

Michael Rubenstein is Associate Professor in English Department specializing in post-1945 Anglophone literature and culture; Irish Modernism; James Joyce; Film; and the Environmental Humanities. His most recent book, Modernism and Its Environments (London Bloomsbury, 2020), was co-authored with Justin Neuman. His previous book, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame: 2010), received the Modernist Studies Association Prize for Best Book of 2010 and the American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize for a Book on Literature. He is co-editor, with Sophia Beal and Bruce Robbins, of a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on "Infrastructuralism" (2015). His current project, Life Support: Fictions of Energy and Environment, examines the figure of the pipeline (aqueducts, transmission lines, and oil pipelines) in a selection of postwar Anglophone film and fiction. He teaches classes in “British Cinema,” “The New Hollywood,” “Irish Modernism,” “Empire and Global English,” and “Energy Humanities.”

 Adrienne Unger Program Coordinator

Adrienne Unger received her BA in English/Creative Writing and Literature from Long Island University-Southampton Campus, and her MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Previously, she was the Administrative Coordinator at the Creative Writing and Literature program at Stony Brook Southampton. Her work for other organizations includes stints at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre Foundation of Maryland, the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, the Kennedy-Krieger Institute and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She was a Washington, DC staff reporter for Crain Communications Inc.’s Business Insurance Magazine and was a freelance writer for various publications including Jubilee, Black Engineers and NSBE Magazine. Adrienne’s poetry, essays and reviews have been published in The Southampton Review, Chautauqua, Mystery Tribune, Harvard Review Online,FLARE: The Flagler Review, Oberon,  Alehouse, Linden Avenue Journal, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Passager,  The Scene and Heard with work forthcoming from Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine.

Ann Berrios Administrative Coordinator

Ann L. Berrios has worked at Stony Brook University in various administrative capacities since 1983. Ms. Berrios graduated as an Art History major from Barnard College (1977) and received her MALS from Stony Brook in 1992. As Administrative Coordinator, Ms. Berrios has been welcoming Humanities Institute guests, keeping its accounts balanced and webpage updated since 2007. Ms. Berrios' writings have been published in The New York Times, Brevity and Open Salon. She is a photographer and web developer/designer who lives with her family (pets and human) in Stony Brook, New York.