The Humanities Institute is pleased to announce our new cohort of graduate student research fellows for 2023-2024. THI research awards support graduate students at all stages of research from initial dissertation research to dissertation completion. This year’s cohort of 25 new fellows is our largest yet, with awardees coming from departments across the Humanities including History, Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, Linguistics, and Literature.
The fellows’ research projects demonstrate a wide range of intellectual commitments and interests. Several dissertations explore questions of border politics, including trans history at the U.S./Mexico border and the reconfiguring of the “American Dream” through Borderlands stories; others delve into the fields of memorialization, Black activism, poetics, the formation of Empire, decolonial and diasporic studies, Japanese American internment, extractivism, agrarian studies, and the history of nursing. Regions of focus range from the Americas to Europe, Asia and the Pacific Rim, encompassing Ecuador, the U.S. Midwest, Mexico, and Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, and Malaysian, Okinawan, and Korean diasporic communities.
“THI is proud to be able to support the tremendous work of our fellows,” says The Humanities Institute Faculty Director Sharon Kinoshita. “Their research exemplifies the way the Humanities deepen our understanding of both past and present, enriching our sense of human cultures and accomplishments, recovering lost histories, and contributing to social justice and other pressing issues of today.”
THI research awards support graduate students at all stages of research from the beginning of their PhD to the end of their dissertation. You can see all THI Fellows on our website. Congratulations to our newest cohort of fellows!
THI Year-Long Dissertation Fellow
Jonathan Van Harmelen, History
“Legislating Injustice: Congress and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II”
Hayden V. White Summer Dissertation Fellow
Stephen David Engel, History of Consciousness
“Deep History and Genre: A Case for Experimentation”
THI Summer Dissertation Fellows
Joe Alicea, Literature
“Improvising Outs: Rehearsals of Endurance, Erasure, and Other Street Things”
Clara Bergamini, History
“Mapping Imperial Japan’s Greatest Calamities: Learning Nation and Enacting Empire Through Disaster”
Leonard Butingan, History
“SPECTRES OF EMPIRE: Black Activism and Cultural Politics in Neocolonial Britain 1975-2000”
Lani Hanna, Feminist Studies
“Counter-Institutional Archives as Political Infrastructure”
Melody Nixon, History of Consciousness
“Thinking Its Subject: Conceptions and Contestations of Race in Contemporary Transpacific Poetics”
Radhika Prasad, Literature
“Hindi Experimentalism and National Language Politics”
Wyatt Young, History
“‘An Honest One:’ Exploiting an Empire at the 1904 Philippine Exposition in St. Louis”
Vishal Sunil Arvindam, Linguistics
“Processing of anti-local reflexives in Telugu”
Mengying (Christina) Wang, History
“Breaking the Glass Case: Memory-Making, Imperialism, and Decolonization in Japanese Postwar Museums”
Summer Pathways Awards
Pablo Escudero, History of Consciousness
“A New Sense of History in a World Caught Between Extractivism and Progress: mining and resistance in Fierro Urco, Ecuador”
Brian Rivera Hernandez, Literature
“Tierra y Libertad!: The Promise of Agrarian Reform in the Mexican Revolution”
Elliot Richardson, History
“Expanding the Field of Trans History: Gender Fluidity and Crossing the US-Mexico Border”
Adriane Stoia, History
“Indigeneity in Diaspora: The Reclamation of Hajichi Tattooing in the Okinawan Diaspora”
Grace Yun, Literature
“Research about death rituals and cultural and religious beliefs within the Korean diaspora”
THI Summer Research Fellows
Bart Feberwee, History of Consciousness
“Crisis, Revolutionary Subjectivity, and Dutch ‘Council Communism’”
Kaiya Gordon, Feminist Studies
“Trans Poetics in the Transsexual News Telegraph Archives”
Ania Mah Gricuk, History
“Chinese medicine and the diaspora in Malaya and Singapore: the case of Ho Yan Hor herbal tea”
Jenny Ham, History of Consciousness
“Paradise for the Insane: Communizing Health/Care, A Case Study of Geel, Belgium”
Emre Keser, History of Consciousness
“’Monsters’ at the End of Empire: Gendering Subjects, Making of the Modern State”
Jonathan Paramore, Linguistics
“Nasalization in Punjabi and Mankiyali”
Maria Pachon Varon, Literature
“Reconfiguring Displacement and the ‘American Dream’ through Borderlands Stories”
Linda Ulbrich, History
“’Yesterday was a difficult day to be Sister’: An Emotional History of First World War Nursing”
Ke Zhao, History
“The Global Journey of Ginseng: A Comprehensive Study of its Impact on Early Modern Trade and Cultural Exchange”
See our announcement about last year’s cohort of THI Graduate Fellows here.
Learn about our new cohort of THI Public Fellows here.