2024 Presenters

Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin is an internationally recognized historian, cultural critic, and public advocate. He is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His academic and political commitments have focused on global cities and particularly the diverse and marginalized communities that struggle to maintain sustainable lives in urban locales. Baldwin is the award-winning author of several books, most recently, In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities and served as the consultant and text author for The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle (2022). His commentaries and opinions have been featured in numerous outlets from NBC News, BBC, and HULU to USA Today, The Washington Post, and TIME magazine. Baldwin was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation for his work in racial and economic justice.

Kenneth M. Cadow is an educator and writer. Gather is his first young adult novel. 

About his book, he says, “In my teaching career, I have encountered dozens upon dozens of stories like Ian’s: kids whose spirits are threatened to be crushed by societal disregard. The kids who are able to pull through by the ingenuity of their skill set and the strength of their character, as well as the care of their larger communities, are some of the strongest people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.” 

Kenneth Cadow is the father of three remarkable adults and lives with his wife and their dog, Quinnie, in Pompanoosuc, Vermont.

S.E. Eisterer is an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. In the academic year 2024-2025 she is also a Visiting Fellow at the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.  S.E.’s research focuses on spatial histories of dissidence, housing histories, and feminist, queer, and trans* theory in architecture. Currently, she is working on two book projects: the interdisciplinary history and translation project Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989 and the edited volume In the Daylight of Our Existence”: Architectural History and the Promise of Queer Theory which illuminates methods and theories in writing about feminist and LGBTQIA+ spaces in architecture. S.E.’s writing has appeared in academic journals, books, and translations, among them Architectural Histories, Aggregate, Architecture Beyond Europe, Ediciones ARQ, Pidigin, Platform, and Log. Together with Erin Sassin she is co-editor of States of Emergency: Architecture, Urbanism, and the First World War (Leuven University Press, 2022).

S.E. has been a Senior Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2021-2025), a Pearl Resnick Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum (2021-2022), a Princeton-Mellon Fellow (2020-2021), and the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2017-2018). She holds a Mag.Arch. from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in History of Architecture and Urbanism.

Erica Heilman is the producer of Rumble Strip, an independent podcast from East Calais, Vermont. 

The show features interviews and documentaries and occasional experiments, which are mostly about other Vermonters. She is the winner of a Peabody Award, a Third Coast Award, and an Independent Media Institute Award. Her work has aired on RadioLab, Snap Judgement, the CBC, and public radio affiliates around the country. 

In 2022, The New Yorker named Rumble Strip the best podcast of the year. In it, Sarah Larson describes it as, “an endlessly inventive, independently produced podcast about her Vermont community, revealing, through an almost miraculous level of attention, what life anywhere is all about.”

Andy Hooper is a native Vermonter who sought his fortune in California, Alaska, DC, and NYC, but always returned to the Green Mountains. Since 2000, he’s worked in technology and raised his family—first in Montpelier and, for the past 10 years, in Middlebury. After spending 11 years as a cheese programmer and data wrangler at Cabot Creamery, he moved over to information security in 2022, taking the position of CISO for Union Mutual Fire Insurance Company. Andy has been involved in local government and governance for the past 22 years, trying to understand and improve his state and community by serving on the local restorative justice board, solid waste district, regional planning commission, library board, city council, and, most recently, select board.

Makenna Janes (she/her) is completing the Helen Gurley Brown BOLD Fellowship at the National Alliance to End Homelessness as a research fellow. As part of the Alliance’s research team, she has researched rural and youth homelessness and co-authored the State of Homelessness 2024 report, which details homelessness trends across the country. She graduated from Middlebury College in 2023 and during her time as a student, she interned at John Graham Housing and Services in Vergennes and is extremely grateful for what she learned from the service providers and clients while there. She grew up in Maine and is interested in studying the unique solutions needed to prevent and end homelessness in states like Maine and Vermont. Makenna is excited for the conversations this Clifford Symposium will bring.

Bess O’Brien is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and theatre producer. Her latest film is Just Getting By—a documentary focused on Vermonters who are struggling with food and housing insecurity.

Other documentary films O’Brien has directed recently are Coming Home focused on five people returning to their Vermont communities from prison, The Listen Up Project—an original Musical based on the lives of Vermont teens, All of Me, a film on body image and eating disorders, The Hungry Heart, about the prescription drug crisis in Vermont and the compassionate work of Dr. Fred Holmes, Ask Us Who We Are focused on youth in foster care, I am From Here looking at racism in VT High Schools and many others. 

US Representative Becca Balint said of Bess’s work, “Bess listens deeply to Vermonters, and makes them the center of her stories. It’s not just about putting out beautiful work, it’s about the change these films make across Vermont.”

Senator Bernie Sanders praised Bess as “exemplary in the state of Vermont and someone who has raised issues that are critical to children and families.”
Sample awards over the years: 

• 2019  Vermont International Film Festival Community Champion Award 
• 2019 Public Health Campion Award from the Vermont Public Health Association
• Hungry Heart winner of the 2016 PRISM award by the Entertainment Industry Council in Los Angeles.
• Hungry Heart winner of the 2015 Media Award from the American Society of Addiction Medicine.
• 2014 Walter Cerf Award for Excellence in the Arts

Linus Owens thinks about movements, places, and the conflicts that bring them together and push them apart. In past work, he has brought these interests together in exploring how anarchists organize online and the place-making and storytelling practices of squatters in Amsterdam. He always seems to be teaching new classes, leaving a long list of former classes in his wake; these include courses on social theory, social movements, disasters, cities, globalization, the environment, tourism, and even a class on performance and the body.

His books include both academic—Cracking Under Pressure: Narrating Decline in the Amsterdam Squatters’ Movement (Amsterdam University Press & Penn State University Press, 2009)—and popular—Lost in the Supermarket: An Indie Rock Cookbook (Soft Skull Press, 2008). 

At the moment, he is working on several exciting new projects, including work on how cameras and masks interact to produce a visual language of political protest, a cultural history of Halloween, and, finally, the complicating ways that activists incorporate travel, movement, and space into their protest tactics. Still, he remains true to his academic and political roots, as a founding member of a European syndicate of researchers working on and with squatting movements, as well as an active participant in the North American Anarchist Studies Network.

Elise Shanbacker currently serves as the Executive Director of Addison Housing Works (AHW), a non-profit organization in rural Vermont dedicated to providing safe, affordable housing for low- and moderate-income residents.  AHW owns and manages over 750 permanently affordable homes, including apartments, single-family homes, and manufactured housing communities. Elise also serves on the Board of the Vermont Community Development Association and the Vergennes Partnership.  Previously, she was a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, with a focus on workforce and economic development.  A native of Washington, DC, Elise first fell in love with Vermont as a student at Middlebury College, graduating in 2007 with a BA in Sociology. She also holds a Masters of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.