The Humanities Institute is thrilled to award eighteen fellowships in support of graduate student research in 2020-2021. THI research awards support the graduate scholarship process from initial-stage dissertation research to dissertation completion. This year’s eighteen new fellows come from departments across the Humanities, including Feminist Studies, Literature, Linguistics, History, and History of Consciousness.
The Fellows’ research projects demonstrate a range of intellectual commitments and interests. Several dissertations explore questions of gender and sexuality, including carceral girlhood in New Orleans and Brazilian lesbian resistance across the Americas; others delve into the fields of medical knowledges, disability studies, environmental studies, race and ethnicity studies, African history, poetics, museum studies, and photography. Regions of focus range from the Americas to Asia and the Pacific Rim to the African continent, encompassing Mexico, Kenya, the U.S. South, and Northeast China.
“This year’s THI Research Fellow cohort brings the world to Santa Cruz through its engagement with a global range of topics and disciplines,” says Nathaniel Deutsch, Director of The Humanities Institute. “We’re excited to take part in enriching campus life by providing support to graduate students to pursue the subjects and areas they’re passionate about.”
THI supports research at all stages as fellows receive support for preliminary graduate research, summer dissertation research, and year-long dissertation writing.
See all THI Fellows on our website. Congratulations to our newest cohort of Fellows!
THI Year-Long Dissertation Fellow
Jessica Calvanico, Feminist Studies
“New Orleans’s Girl Problems: The House of the Good Shepherd and the Making of Carceral Girlhood”
THI Summer Dissertation Fellows
Christian Alvarado, History of Consciousness
““The Storm in Kenya”: Mau Mau in African Historical and Educational Thought”
Bristol Cave-LaCoste, History
“Living Openly and Notoriously: Sexually-Nonconforming Women Navigating Immigration Control, 1852-1924”
Kyuhyun Han, History
“Seeing the Forest Like a State: Forest Management, Wildlife Conservation, and Center-Periphery Relations in Northeast China, 1949 – 1988”
Kirstin Wagner, Literature
“Matrilineal Inheritance and the Poetics of Daughterhood: A Study in Waves”
Ka-eul Yoo, Literature
“Cold War Disability: The Biopolitics of U.S. Military Empire in Post-1945 Asia”
THI Summer Research Fellows
Benjamin Eischens, Linguistics
“Negative indefinites in San Martín Peras Mixtec”
Morgan Gates, Literature
“Listening to the Frank Kofsky Archives”
Andrew Hedding, Linguistics
“On the Relationship between Questions and Answers: Evidence from San Martín Peras Mixtec”
Amanda Huse, History
“Freedwomen, Testimony, and Ku-Klux Violence in Reconstruction Georgia”
Charles Krysinski, History
“Black Theology and the End of Time”
Thaïs Miller, Literature
“Vaudeville to GLOW: One Hundred Years of Jewish Humor, Jewish Women, Trauma, and Discrimination in Los Angeles”
Gabriel Mindel, History of Consciousness
“Profanity: Performance and the Abolitionary Politics of Noise”
Anne Napatalung, Feminist Studies
“Tracing Medical Knowledges: Black and Indigenous Alabama Lay Midwives and the Tuskegee School of Nurse-Midwifery”
Marina Segatti, Feminist Studies
“Sapatão é Resistência: Brazilian lesbian resistance across the Americas”
Meleia Simon-Reynolds, History
“Visualizing Trans-Colonial Labor: Photographic Representations of Filipino Sugar Plantation Workers in Hawai’i”
Matthew Smith, History of Consciousness
“The Radical Human in the Situationist International, 1957-72”
Jinghong Zhang, History
“Down to the Roots: Teeth, Dentistry, and Dental Health in Modern China, 1907-1985”
See our announcement about last year’s cohort of Public Fellows here.