Campus Fellowships
HRI grants Campus Fellowships to Illinois faculty and graduate students, who spend the year engaged in research and writing and participate in the HRI Fellows Seminar.
Faculty fellows are provided with one semester of release time and research funds. Graduate student fellows are given a stipend and a tuition and partial fee waiver for the academic year of the award. All fellows are expected to maintain residence on the Illinois campus during the award year, and to participate in HRI activities, including the yearlong Fellows Seminar.
2026–27 HRI Fellowships: “Up Against Erasure”
About the Fellowship Theme
The etymology of the English word “erasure” leaves no doubt about the violence at the heart of its proposition.
With a genealogy in the Latin “eradere,” erasure begins in a root that means “to scrape off,” and leads us toward “scrubbing out,” “striking out,” “removal,” “deletion.” From there it moves headlong into “effacement,” “expungement,” “excision,” “elimination.”
At the end of this logic chain is the ineluctable possibility of erasure, otherwise understood as its fateful remainder: “obliteration.”
Not all erasures work the same way. Some follow closely upon an event or claim. Some are instantaneous. Others take years, decades, centuries, or millennia to bring about, let alone to recognize. Erasures operate at multiple scales. They have specific linguistic and vernacular meanings. They are seen and unseen. They are often buried or denied or recast in ways that or weaponize or even sentimentalize their meanings.
The ambition of the research and practice at the evolving heart of the humanities in the middle of this decade is arguably to show and to tell why the subjects we take up are both in danger of erasure and yet impossible to obliterate. Our charge is to work toward practices that document erasure in order, ultimately, to push up against it, wherever it is happening.
HRI is seeking proposals for its annual Fellows Seminar that are rooted in research in the humanities, arts, and related fields—and which build out from the substance of that work to persuade us of the stakes of identifying processes of erasure, of being up against it, and of working in opposition to it.
In addition to identifying the subject of your research, your proposal narrative should help us understand how erasure works in the archives you use; the imaginaries you engage with; the data you assemble; the fictions or visual economies you are preoccupied with; the social relations or polities you study, the ecologies you identify; the languages you work in; the material objects you engage with; and/or the universe of theory or practice you are immersed in.
What are the strategies you use for combatting the work of erasure? (How) does interdisciplinarity serve that work? Are your methods portable to other arenas of inquiry and practice?
What are the benefits of naming erasure, and the risks of failing to do so, as humanists intensify their search for ways of connecting inquiry to action?
Last but not least, what are the impediments to working against erasure—and what do you hope a year in the HRI interdisciplinary Fellows Seminar will afford you in terms of sharpening your conviction about what that means, now?
The projects proposed to HRI for 2026–27 fellowships will be evaluated on the scholarly excellence and promise of the project, the applicant’s preparation/readiness to undertake the proposed research, the quality of the narrative proposal, the relationship to the annual theme, the case made for how the interdisciplinary experience offered by the Fellows Seminar would be beneficial to the project, and the letters of support.
HRI welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments with a commitment to fostering humanities and humanities-inflected research. HRI is especially interested in fostering interdisciplinary work, both within the humanistic disciplines, and between the humanities and the arts.
See the links below for specific guidelines. The submission portal will open on September 1, 2025.