2026–27 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. The 2026–27 theme is “Up Against Erasure.”

Please join HRI in congratulating the new fellows!

HRI Campus Fellows

Faculty Fellows

Eric Calderwood (Comparative and World Literature), “The Girl from Tetouan: Amina Loh and the Margins of Moroccan Culture”

Olha Khometa (Slavic Languages and Literatures), “The Erasure of Ukrainian Modernism in the Soviet Union: Poetry and Politics, 1910–1930”

Rosalyn LaPier (History), “Saokiotapi Wayfinding”

Kimberly Mack (English), “Brown Sugar Blues: The White Soundtrack of a Black Girl Who Loves Rock”

Junaid Rana (Asian American Studies), “The War on Terror as Erasure”

Lindsay Rose Russell (English), “Sex and Lex”

Angelica Waner (Spanish and Portuguese), “Knowledge Keepers: How Isthmus Zapotec Magazines Shape Autonomy and Futurities”

Graduate Fellows

David Bishop (English), “Reading Against Erasure: Archival Silences & the Lost Works of Augustus M. Hodges”

Yating Li (East Asian Languages and Cultures), “Pathologizing the Womb: Medical Knowledge, the Female Body, and Mirage of Health in China (1900s–1940s)”

Owen MacDonald (History), “Caribbean Amazônia: The Madeira-Mamoré Railroad, Labor, and the Making of Race, Gender, and Empire in Northwestern Brazil, 1870–1942”

Gerson Morales Pérez (Spanish and Portuguese), “From Erasure to Memory: Cultural Representations of War, Indigeneity and Resistance in Contemporary Guatemala”

Anirban Mukhopadhyay (Institute of Communications Research), “Governing the AIR: Radio, Polity, and Nationalism in Postcolonial India, 1950–2023”

Cheryl Trauscht (History), “Ubiquitous Stuff, Invisible People: Making Barrels, Knowledge, and Stories in the British Atlantic, 1620 to 1783”

Taisuke L. Wakabayashi (Landscape Architecture), “Nuclear Terrains: Four Landscapes Against Entanglement”