2024–25 Theme: Think Again
2024–25 HRI Fellowships: “Think Again...”
The 2024–25 fellowship year theme is “Think Again...”
What is the impulse of research? To encourage ways of thinking differently about a subject, an established theory, a reigning assumption about how things work. That is, the questions we investigate should require us to reconsider the world as we know it and make the case for our work as an intervention in what passes for settled or given in our field /s of inquiry. This is an especially pressing challenge for interdisciplinary humanities research, which is typically boundless, both substantively and methodologically, yet can fall short of specifying how and why it aims to rethink norms or re-orient emerging paradigms.
HRI’s 2024–2025 theme, “Think Again...,” is an invitation to revisit well-known texts, to upend dominant narratives, to historicize what appears self-evident in the present, and/or to ask what happens when we juxtapose x with y in ways never been done before. It asks us to consider who our audiences are; who we are as researchers; how the fields we work in are constituted; and what it means to develop our capacities to talk across disciplinary boundaries. “Think Again” underscores, too, the opportunity to think across diverse interdisciplinary formations, and to identify when, how and under what conditions new ones may be happening.
In that sense, “Think Again…” is as much an opportunity to reflect on methodologies and the forms of expression or narration they entail as it is a theme per se. What does your work require us to re-think, re-imagine, re-design, re-verse, re-animate, re-cast, re-contextualize, re-direct, re-make?
Capacious yet pointed, the provocation “think again” directs us not just to explore our subject matter but in doing so, to identify the stakes of our research for the variety of audiences it hails: to say why it matters, and to whom.
2024–25 Fellows
Faculty
Angela J. Aguayo (Media and Cinema Studies), “Collective Matters: Documentary Film Practice and Public Engagement in the US, 1970-Present”
Toby C. Beauchamp (Gender and Women’s Studies), “Trans Studies for Grim Times”
Angela Calcaterra (American Indian Studies), “Bearing Arms: US Gun Violence and Indigenous Relationality”
Jamie Jones (English), “The Affordances of Energy: Imagining Fossil Fuels in the 19th and 20th Centuries”
Charlesia McKinney (English), “Pandemic Pleasure Pedagogies: Black-American Women’s Strategies of Survival”
Edward O’Byrn (African American Studies), “Existence Precedes Enslavement”
Alexia Williams (Religion and African American Studies), “Race to Sainthood: Roman Catholicism & the US Racial Imagination”
Graduate
Alana Ackerman (Anthropology), “Rethinking War Across Borders: Violence, Refuge, and the ‘Colombian Armed Conflict’ in Quito, Ecuador”
Chelsea Birchmier (Psychology), “‘Searching for the Nexus’ Between Two Movements: Fight for $15 and Possibilities for Black Worker Struggle in St. Louis, Missouri”
Sharayah L. Cochran (Art History), “Dangerous Photographs: What’s the harm in documentary?”
Anna Sophia Flood (English), “Slavery’s Eerie Presence: The Graphic Gothic’s Capturing of Dark Histories and Distorted Futures”
Lázaro García Angulo (Spanish and Portuguese), “‘Yet Another Woman-Man’: Representations of Gender Nonconformity in Spain, 1880-1939”
Austin Hoffman (Anthropology), “The Bite that Binds: Care, Violence and Liminality in Wolf Sanctuary”
Nathan Tanner (Education Policy, Organization & Leadership), “Document-Based and Oral Histories of Diné Experiences in the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program, 1945–2000”