Announcing Three 2026-27 THI Faculty Research Fellows
We are excited to announce three THI Faculty Research Fellows who will receive support for their academic projects in the 2026-2027 academic year. This fellowship aims to provide faculty at different stages in their career with the time needed to pursue their research.
This year’s THI Faculty Research Fellowship awardees are Assistant Professor Hannah Cole (Literature), Associate Professor Jennifer Kelly (Feminist Studies/Critical Race and Ethnic Studies), and Professor Grace Delgado (History).
See the fellows’ project descriptions below and check our newsletter and website for stories about their research in the year ahead. A list of all THI Fellows is available here.
Congratulations to our three new Faculty Fellows!
THI Faculty Research Fellows
From left to right: Assistant Professor Hannah Cole, Professor Grace Delgado, and Associate Professor Jennifer Kelly.
Hannah Cole (Literature): “Beyond Monoculture”
“Beyond Monoculture” examines how the vegetal ecosystems of the Caribbean archipelago continue to enact material afterlives of plantation slavery more than a century after its abolition. While a few cash crops enriched European empires, the diverse flora at the edges of plantations offered culinary, medicinal, and spiritual resources to enslaved Africans. Today, many of these once-peripheral plants are being commodified by global capital as “superfoods,” cosmetics, and biofuels. Understanding this recent trend as an outgrowth of the plantation system, my project follows six plants from the colonial period to today to trace how their cultural meanings have shifted as their matter has been repurposed.
Grace Peña Delgado (History): “The Chosen Line: A Biography of the U.S.-Mexico Border”
“The Chosen Line” is a biography of the U.S.–Mexico Border, told not as a legal boundary but as a living structure shaped by human decisions and sustained through daily acts of governance. Drawing on archival, legal, and ethnographic sources, it traces how the Border came to organize movement, labor, and belonging across centuries. This is a history of how the Border was built—not just where it lies, but how it lives.
Jennifer Kelly (Feminist Studies/Critical Race and Ethnic Studies): “Against Apocalypse: U.S. Christian Zionism and Its Apostates”
“Against Apocalypse” is a study of the history and narrative logics of U.S. Christian Zionism, its centrality to U.S. support for Israeli state violence, and the labor of Christian anti-racist organizers who resist its tenets. Drawing from literature across feminist studies, anthropology, and ethnic studies that has unpacked the language and affect of evangelism, “Against Apocalypse” aims to understand the transnational conversations, spiritual renegotiations, and international travel that have characterized these “conversions,” of a sort, toward Palestine solidarity and away from Christian Zionism. This work will study the political implications of travel, the contours of U.S. foreign policy, the racialized and gendered underpinnings of Christian Zionist support for Israeli state violence, and the affective labor of narration within cross-border movement building.