Congratulations to THI’s 2025-2026 Fellows
The Humanities Institute is pleased to announce our new cohort of graduate and faculty fellows for 2025-2026.
This year, we are awarding 21 Graduate Research Fellows, 4 Graduate Student Public Fellows, and 4 Faculty Research Fellows.
THI is proud to directly fund the work of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students through a range of fellowship opportunities. Faculty receive a course reduction and research stipend that enable them to begin new projects or publish their work as articles or a book. Graduate students receive summer THI fellowships that allow them to engage in intensive research, including traveling for fieldwork and writing chapters of their dissertation, or partner with community organizations. With our support, THI fellows gain much needed time, funding, and support to pursue and share their groundbreaking scholarship.
You can see all THI Fellows on our website. Congratulations to our new fellows!
Congratulations to our 2025-2026 THI Faculty Fellows!
Anjali Arondekar, Feminist Studies
“Oceanic Sex: Archives of Caste and Indenture”
Sophia Azeb, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
“Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab”
Shelly Chan, History
“Disappearance of the Nanyang: A Frontier History between China and Southeast Asia”
Caro Flores, Philosophy
“The unfinished return: Portuguese colonialism and white ignorance”
Congratulations to our 2025-2026 THI Graduate Student Research Fellows!
Hayden V. White Summer Dissertation Fellow
Won Jeon, History of Consciousness
“Project for a Cybernetic Psychology: A History of Machine Learning, 1840 to the present”
THI Summer Dissertation Fellows
Two top proposals were selected as UC Network Fellows to represent UC Santa Cruz as part of a cohort of University of California fellows.
Mia Tempestt Boykin, Literature (UC Network Fellow)
“Wanda, Why Aren’t You Dead?: A Literary Revival & Honoring of Wanda Coleman”
Arlo Fosburg, Feminist Studies (UC Network Fellow)
“University Discipline: Militarization, Scientific Agriculture, and the Land-Grant College System”
Xafsa Ciise, History of Consciousness
“Hypnosis, The Other, and the Making of Modern Trauma Theory”
Stefania Cotei, History of Consciousness
“Unarchiving Memory: Silenced Histories of Romani Slavery in the Inter-Imperial Context of the Romanian Principalities”
Carlos Cruz, History
“Rethinking the Indigenous Proletariat: Land, Autonomy, and Resistance in Rural Mexico, 1890–1952”
Kiley McLaughlin, Literature
“Mámaw: Unruly Imaginings in the Undercurrents of Empire”
Em Padilla, Feminist Studies
“Inclusion as a Necropolitical Project: Transness, the Latinx Soldiering Experience and the Future(s) of the U.S. War Machine”
Jonathan Paramore, Linguistics
“Listeners Adapt Speech Based on Talker Social Status: Evidence from Pakistani Punjabi”
THI Summer Pathways Awards
Yadi Dong, Philosophy
“Memory in the Hands of Power: Institutional Mnemonic Injustice Against Black and Indigenous Communities”
Anna Egorova, History of Consciousness
“Muslim Socialist Visions: Volga Tatars and Self-Determination in Revolutionary Russia”
Francesca Gibson, History
“Hysterical Conceptions: The Intersection of Madness, Childbirth, and Medical Beliefs in the 17th and 18th Centuries”
Emily Knick, Linguistics
“Temporal meaning in Khalkha Mongolian”
Tanvi Rupakula, History
“Ethnohistory of Debt in Early Colonial India”
THI Summer Research Fellows
Jose Chavez Ayala, History
“A Race in Division: Revisiting America’s Drug War and its Racial Dimensions”
Annika Berry, Literature
“The Life of Another: Pulling at the Roots of Modern Biography”
Lilith Frakes, History of Consciousness
“The Mystery Monkey: Hybrid Primates and the Politics of Conservation in a Changing World”
Larry Lyu, Linguistics
“Archive and investigation of the endangered Salar language”
Sebahat Yagmur Kiper, Linguistics
“Ellipsis Investigations”
Sagarika Pandey, History
“Industrial capitalism and Labour in Central India: a study of cotton textile and coal industry (1890-1990)”
C.L. Barber Fellowship
Spencer Armada, Literature
Congratulations to our 2025-2026 THI Graduate Student Public Fellows!
Four Humanities graduate students will bring their scholarship and academic expertise to communities and develop new skills outside of a university setting as the Summer 2025 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.
Daniel Arias (Literature) – Eastside Magazine
Sam Kahn (Philosophy) – Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO)
J. Ramos (Literature) – Pollen Initiative
Linda Ulbrich (History) – City of Santa Cruz
Don’t miss our announcement of THI’s 2024-2025 Undergraduate Research Fellows, and look for a call for 2025-2026 undergraduate fellows soon.