2025–26 Theme: Story and Place
In spite of the impact of global economic and culture forces on our lives—and of course because of it—attention to the particularity of place remains key to how humanists and artists think about the world. How does your work engage with place-based experiences, histories, performative cultures, languages, politics, literatures? What does storytelling that emerges from specific places and spaces contribute to how we apprehend the visual, the material, the political, the queer, or the orthodox?
Place often takes root through story, but it is as often made in the telling. How can storytelling and story-making create place and its attachments—or unravel it, or make it legible to new audiences? What is the role of place-based story in how we grapple with war, social movements, equity work, fantasy, political ideology, art practice, social media, ecological crisis, and/or the land grant university itself? And what is “place” beyond the local, exactly?
HRI invites proposals which engage the intersection of place and story in a variety of mediums— narrative, textual, maker-oriented, graphic, and more. We look forward to learning from humanities- and arts-based researchers who are working with place at any scale and in any number of forms. We’re interested in the geography closest in or the farthest out; in stories that stick close to home or those that carry home with them as they move.
We’re curious, in short, about multi-form ways of exploring the places, real and imagined, that help us reckon with the world as we know it, tell it, and want it to be told. If place is a backdrop to how you are communicating your work, this is an opportunity, in the context of a yearlong interdisciplinary seminar, to converse with colleagues interested in experimenting with how to bring place and storytelling into sharper relation.
2025–26 Campus Fellows
Faculty Fellows
Serouj Aprahamian (Assistant Professor, Dance), “‘Showtime!’: Dancing in the New York City UnderGround”
Ryan Griffis (Professor, Art and Design), “When the Landscape Recognizable Today Was Shaped”
Rachelle Grossman (Assistant Professor, Comparative and World Literature), “Afterwords: Yiddish in the Postwar World”
Amy Hassinger (Assistant Professor, Creative Writing/English), “DIMMENING, a linked collection of stories”
Simi Kang (Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies), “Against Refugee Resilience: On Restoration & Environmental Sacrifice at the Ocean’s Edge”
Daniel Nabil Maroun (Assistant Professor, French and Italian), “The Politics of Kinship: Writing Queerness, Filiation, and Race in Contemporary France”
Mirelsie Velázquez (Associate Professor, Latina/Latino Studies and Education Policy, Organization & Leadership), “Genealogies of Empowerment and the Makings of Home: Latina/o Activism at the University of Illinois, 1970–1992”
Graduate Fellows
Kirsten Barker (Music), “Max of the Antarctic: Stories of ‘Wilderness’ in Music and Word”
Debayudh Chatterjee (English), “Militant Memories after the End of History: The New World Order and Progressive Indian Cultural Praxis (1989–2014)”
Asmaa Elsayed (Education Policy, Organization & Leadership), “Between Shadows and Stories: Navigating the Physical and Digital to Redefine ‘Place’ and Reclaim Belonging for Ex-Muslim Women”
Stanislav Khudzik (History), “1905 After 1917: The Bolshevik Archive, Oral Storytelling, and Historical Media in Early Soviet Leningrad, 1921–1926”
Emerson Parker Pehl (English), “Colonial Unknowing in the Collective Unconscious: The Reverberations of Colonial Expropriation from the Archives of Psychoanalytic Thought”
Ilaria Strocchia (Spanish and Portuguese), “Flowing Histories: Examining the Role of Water in Shaping Urban Spaces and Identities Across Cultures”
Priyanka Zylstra (History), “ ‘It was called Liberation’: South Asian Women’s Activism in Multi-Racial Britain, 1979–1994”