2025–26 HRI Fellows Announced
The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has awarded its annual Faculty and Graduate Student Fellowships to seven faculty members and seven graduate students from the campus for the 2025–26 academic year. The theme for the year is “Story and Place.”
Please join HRI in congratulating the new fellows!
HRI 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), “Specters of Communism in the Age of Hindutva and Globalization: Reimagining the ‘Left’ in Progressive Indian Literature and Cinema (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), “Feminism, Activism, and Resistance: South Asian Women in Multi-Racial Britain, 1971–1993”