Announcing 25 New THI Graduate Fellows for 2026-27
The Humanities Institute is pleased to announce a new cohort of graduate student fellows for 2026-27.
THI research awards support graduate students at all stages of research from initial dissertation research to dissertation completion. This year’s 20 awardees come from departments across the Humanities including History, Feminist Studies, Philosophy, History of Consciousness, Linguistics, and Literature.
The fellows’ research projects demonstrate a wide range of intellectual commitments and interests. Several dissertations explore the intersections between medicine, inequality, and political agency; others examine feminist activism in social and political movements, diaspora politics, poetics, documentary filmmaking as political practice, the genealogy of the nation-state, and Indigenous struggles for political autonomy. Regions of focus range from the Americas to Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, encompassing Britain, China, Ecuador, Mongolia, Palestine, and Jewish diasporic communities.
Five Humanities graduate students will also bring their scholarship and academic expertise to communities and develop new skills outside of a university setting as the Summer 2026 cohort of THI Public Fellows. Public Fellows contribute to research, programming, communications and fundraising at companies, non-profit organizations, and cultural institutions and gain valuable experience applying their skills and expertise outside the academy.
You can see all THI Fellows on our website. Congratulations to our new fellows!
Congratulations to our 2026-27 THI Graduate Student Fellows!
Hayden V. White Summer Dissertation Fellow
Hannah Jayanti, Film and Digital Media
“Documentary as Practice: The Transformative Possibilities of Nonfiction Through Speculative and Place-Based Filmmaking”
THI Summer Dissertation Fellows
Jess Fournier, Feminist Studies
“From Resistance to Resilience: Confronting Sexual Violence in the United States”
Rebecca Gross, Literature (UC Network Fellow)
“Towards a Diasporic Internationalism: Reading and Critiquing the Contemporary Jewish Anti-Zionist Cultural Movement”
Emre Keser, History of Consciousness
“Man/Monster/State: Genealogies of the Nation-State and the (In)Human”
Katherine Johnson-Rogers, Literature
“The Patient as a Revolutionary Subject”
Melissa Mack, Literature
“Nature as the Land of the Dead: A Necropoetic Inquiry”
Richard Houlin Wang, Linguistics (UC Network Fellow)
“Computational and Corpus Approaches to Lenition in Beijing Mandarin”
THI Summer Research Fellows
Pablo Escudero, History of Consciousness
“The Birth of Indigenous Autonomy: the Contemporary Political Life of the Pueblo Kichwa de Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon”
Caitlin-Anne Flaws, Linguistics
“Variation in the semantics of time across Mongolic languages”
Francesca Gibson, History
“Hysterical Conceptions: Madness, Childbirth, and Empire in the 17th and 18th Centuries”
Mia Haas-Goldberg, History
“To ID a Tree: Rubber Replanting as Regional Integration in Thailand, 1960-1982”
Emily Knick, Linguistics
“Variation in the semantics of time across Mongolic languages”
Ariella Patchen, History of Consciousness
“Institutional Time, Managed Affect, and the Hospital as a Site of (Im)Possibility”
Matthew Marzec, Philosophy
“How We Got Here: The Historical Roots of Distrust in Expertise”
THI Summer Pathways Fellows
Nadine Abdel-Rahman, Linguistics
“Two Paths to Superlatives in Palestinian Arabic”
Keyu Dong, Linguistics
“Investigating Evidentiality in Shilluk”
Jean-Paul Gazzaneo-Duarte, Philosophy
“The Metaphysics of Latin American Possibility”
Brianna Matson, History
“Gender, Expressive Culture, and Political Struggle in the United Farm Workers Movement”
Andrew Zhou, Philosophy
“Middle fundamentality: modality and meta-explanation”
C.L. Barber Fellow
Lily Grimes, Literature
THI Public Fellows
Yadi Dong, Philosophy – Taraaz
Brianna Matson, History – Kuumbwa Jazz
Jihoon Park, Literature – Catamaran Literary Reader
Joshua Daniel Sto Domingo, History – GLBT Historical Society
Richard Houlin Wang, Linguistics – Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages