HRI–Mellon Emerging Areas in the Humanities | HRI - Humanities Research Institute

In January 2015, the Mellon Foundation awarded a grant of $2,050,000 to HRI to support the development of emerging areas in the humanities. The funds support fellowships for Illinois faculty and graduate students, and undergraduate interns, as well as post-doctoral fellows, creating robust research groups in three areas: Bio-Humanities, Environmental Humanities, and Legal Humanities.

Environmental Humanities

Faculty Fellow

Bob Morrissey (History)

Post-Doctoral Fellows

2018-19

Leah Aronowsky (PhD, History of Science, Harvard University, 2018)
“Configuring the Planetary Environment as a Scientific Object”
Pollyana Rhee (PhD, Architecture, Columbia University, 2018)
“Designing Natural Advantages: Environmental Visions, Civic Ideals, and Architecture for Community, 1920–1970”

Pre-Doctoral Fellows

2019-20

Douglas Jones, History “The Cult of the Yankee Mining Engineer: Engineering Nature, Race, and Labor in the US, Canada, and South Africa, 1886–1922”
Jessica Landau, Art History
“‘Critical Habitat’: Picturing Conservation, Extinction, and the American Animal in the Long Twentieth Century”

2018–19

Samantha Good (Spanish and Portuguese)
“Negotiated Ecologies: Indigeneity and Ecocriticism in 19th-Century Bolivia and Chile”
Alexandra Paterson (English)
“Geological Bodies: The Earth and Narratives of the Self in Romantic-Period Britain, 1784–1820”

Undergraduate Interns

2019-20

Alaina Bottens, Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences / Gender & Women’s Studies
Sarah Gediman, History / Earth, Society & Environmental Sustainability
Amanda Watson, English / Political Science

2018–19

Juan Martin Luna Nunez (Urban Studies and Planning)
Clara Pokorny (Urban Studies and Planning)
April Wendling (Geography and Earth Society & Environmental Sustainability, minor in Integrative Biology)

Bio-Humanities

Faculty Fellow

Samantha Frost (Political Science / Gender and Women's Studies)

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Rosine Kelz (PhD, Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, 2014)
“Beyond the human?’: Concepts of Humanity, Responsibility, and Agency in Political Theory and Biotechnology”
Daniel Liu (PhD, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2016)
“Vision and Calculation of Living Matter”

Pre-Doctoral Fellows

2016–17

Lydia Crafts (History)
“Empire’s Laboratory: Race, Ethics, and Medical Experimentation in Guatemala during the Cold War”
Rebecah Pulsifer (English)
“Signifying Nothing: Intelligence and Intellectual Disability in British Modernism”

2017–18

Robert Rouphail (History)
“Disastrous Kinships: Nature, Gender, and Resilience in Moder Mauritius, 1892–1980”
Michael Uhall (Political Science)
“Companion Ecologies”