Current Fellows

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HRI Campus Fellows 2026–27: Up Against Erasure

Faculty Fellows

Olha Khometa, Slavic Languages and Literatures
“Ukrainian Modernism and Its Erasure in the Soviet Union: Poetry and Politics, 1910—1930.” 

This revisionist and recovery book project examines the development of Ukrainian modernism during the 1910s and 1920s within the context of the transnational modernist movement and its erasure in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and afterward. It focuses on three most eminent modernist Ukrainian poets, Pavlo Tychyna, Mykola Bazhan, and Mykhail Semenko, whose lives and legacies epitomize Ukraine’s history under the Soviet occupation. Through careful, structurally informed literary interpretation as a tool for revising historical memory and scholarship, the book deeply explores erasure, demonstrating the Soviet empire’s processes and means of erasing Ukrainian modernist culture, as well as Ukrainian modernists’ resistance to those efforts in their artistic production.

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

Growing up, rock music provided an outlet to express my anger, sadness, frustration, and joy. Rock was also a site of hostility and exclusion. In Brown Sugar Blues, I braid together memoir, biography, and cultural criticism to explore the personal and historical impacts of the erasure of Black people from rock—a style of music with Black origins. I tell the story of my musical listening and hard-fought journey to finding my own voice, alongside the stories of the rock artists who made a different way of being possible for me.

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

My book monograph Pakistani Brooklyn in the Age of Terror documents everyday life in the decades since 9/11. The domestic War on Terror has worked as a form of erasure s through a transformation of life as we know it. This project asks how the Global War on Terror will be remembered, and from whose point of view. During the seminar I will complete the writing of one chapter and draft a second chapter toward the completion of my book manuscript with the goal of submitting it for formal review to an academic publisher.

Jacki Thompson Rand, American Indian Studies / History
“Tribal Self-Determination, Economic Development, and the Status of Native Women in the Jim Crow South”

This book discusses historically rooted, unchecked violence against Indigenous women as a critical counterpoint to a restrictive mid-century vision of tribal self-governance framed in colonial goals aligned with specific features of a settler capitalist nation. A case of the rape and death of a young Native American teenage girl in 1971 serves as a portal that opens onto a historical analysis of the emergent, double-stranded, federal policy of tribal economic development and self-determination that offered a degree of freedom to Native American tribal governments from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Both, as an early discursive departure from legislation aiming to terminate tribal sovereignty and as a subsequent codified policy (1975), are examined here in a specific temporal and spatial location—the Mississippi Choctaw homelands in Neshoba County, Mississippi-- shaped by oppressive layers of colonial and Jim Crow political, economic, and social formations, making this an intersectional study. At the heart of this book is a critical interrogation of the presumed benefit of tribal sovereignty and self-determination to the citizens of tribal nations, beset by a virulent, persistent plague of violence as represented by the case of Berniece Bell and other Choctaw women and, ultimately, of the meaning of Native American self-determination.

Lindsay Rose Russell, English
“Sex and Lex”

Sex & Lex tours English’s lexicons of sex and sexuality and analyzes how mainstream dictionaries of the past and present have—and have not—treated such terms, often pitting publishing interests against editorial commitments. Taken together, the profusion of sexy lexicons and the problematics of sex in staid ones, reveals that the treatment of taboo terminology has been crucial to the invention and popularity of the dictionary, even as dictionary definitions of sexual terms have often compromised both lexicographical integrity and human legibility.

Angelica Waner, Spanish and Portuguese
“Knowledge Keepers: How Isthmus Zapotec Magazines Shape Autonomy and Futurities Across Twentieth Century Mexico”

This project focuses on a corpus of bilingual (Spanish and Diidxazá/Isthmus Zapotec) newspapers and literary magazines published in Mexico from the 1930s-1990s and examines how their creation and publication directly countered state efforts toward the erasure of Indigenous Zapotec people. The magazines highlight the long history of Indigenous print culture and the ways that writing became integral to the Zapotec intellectuals’ goals of cultural preservation and revitalization alongside and in conversation with broader intellectual and cultural movements in Mexico and across Latin America. Ultimately, the magazines become the space where the intellectuals could (re)create Isthmus Zapotec cosmology, history, and politics in a continuous loop of preservation and revitalization, enacting autonomy and futurities. 

Asif Wilson, Curriculum and Instruction
“kNOw History kNOw Self: Black Educational Placemaking In The Midst of School Violence”

Latina/o students in the 1970s began to challenge their limited status in institutions of higher learning, across the state, led by mostly first-generation Latina and Latino students. This history of Latina/o/x students in higher education is part of a decades-long, wider genealogy of activism. The makings of home at institutions of higher learning across the Midwest, with the University of Illinois central to this story, show us the ways Latina/os have been instrumental in radically transforming educational spaces amidst the contentious socio-political culture of the era.

Graduate Student Fellows

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

This project examines how processes of erasure—material decay, institutional bias, and digitization—shape the literary record, and recovers works buried in the archive, yet erased by cultural memory. Through computational analysis of Chronicling America Newspapers, I recover 494 serialized narratives, including extensive fiction by Augustus M. Hodges, a Black author whose remarkable output has been forgotten through disciplinary selection. By both identifying structural erasures and restoring what they have obscured, this project demonstrates how computational recovery can push back against the forces that obscure literary history.

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

This dissertation investigates the emergence and circulation of “womb maladies” (zigong bing 子宫病) as a central medical and social category in Republican China (1900s -1940s). Moving beyond conventional narratives of medical modernization, I argue that the term’s strategic ambiguity allowed it to function as a diagnostic shield in medical disputes, a commercial cover for illicit practices, and a tool for constructing a new pathologized womanhood. By analyzing the fluid archive of medical texts, legal cases, newspapers, and female writings, my research reveals how this discourse reshaped modern Chinese womanhood around the unhealthy womb.

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

At the turn of the twentieth-century, thousands of workers traveled to the Brazilian Amazon to work on a railroad project designed to facilitate the transportation of rubber. Most of them were African-descendent laborers from the Caribbean. The history of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad is one of repeated attempts at erasure and steadfast resistance to this violent process. The years of ostensible failure interspersed with brief successes reveal a dialectical relationship between a constantly changing multi-racial, multi-national, and multi-lingual workforce looking to improve their material conditions and the evolving needs of a transforming Brazilian nation-state striving
to be perceived as modern as well as a developing vision of United Statesian empire. Central to this dialectic were questions of Indigenous resistance and dispossession and the struggle between
interethnic worker solidary and the solidification of categories of race and gender.

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

This dissertation project examines how contemporary cultural production critically approach the ongoing erasure of Indigenous histories and the unresolved legacies of the Guatemalan civil war.
It argues that creative practices across multiple mediums function as counter-archives that reactivate silenced pasts and expose the persistence of racialized violence. Through analysis of embodied, visual, poetics, and diasporic forms, the project traces how memory is inscribed onto bodies, landscape, and migratory routes. Ultimately, it demonstrates that the civil war's logic of erasure continues to shape national and transnational realities, and that cultural expression becomes a vital conduit of resistance against historical and political disappearances.

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

After emerging from colonial rule, the Indian state regulated All India Radio (AIR) to frame narratives of “Indian-ness" while burying marginalized voices on air. Tracing broadcasting policies and radio programming in postcolonial India, this dissertation reveals the hidden narratives of erasure on radio and the acts of resistance towards these erasures. Drawing on formal and informal archives and primarily employing cultural historical methods, this project historicizes radio to understand the contemporary Indian context and addresses two central questions: how AIR functions as a tool of exclusion, and what practices contest exclusionary state narratives on radio.

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

Barrels and other wooden casks were the Amazon.com boxes of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic World. These once-ubiquitous objects have decayed and disappeared. Their makers – artisans called coopers – left scant traces in the archive, while the traditional epistemologies used to construct the containers are now obsolete. In my dissertation, I excavate these faint documentary and practical craft traces using historical reconstruction, literary analysis, and intersectional archival techniques. In doing so, I uncover the symbiotic relationship between artisanal knowledge and settler colonialism, and how race and gender came to supplant social status as the main agents of archival preservation or erasure.

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

How can we understand nuclear landscapes as co-productive sites of human-nuclear entanglement, without erasing the power differentials at stake? Building on and against the new materialist conceptualizations of entanglement, my dissertation proposes a relational framework that unflattens “landscapes” into four analytic “terrains,” revealing configurations of power between human design-thinking and the confounds of radiological materiality. Through case studies that crosscut Japan (Hiroshima and Fukushima) and the United States (Illinois and New Mexico), I map these terrains across sites of nuclear infrastructure, warmaking, and scientific discovery to resituate power within the "more-than-human world" of new materialism and to envision ways of inhabiting the Nuclear Anthropocene.

 

Summer Faculty Fellows

Course Development

Yazmín M. Crespo Claudio, Architecture
Arch 403: Spatial Theories From/With the Caribbean

With the support of the HRI Summer Faculty Fellowship, I will further develop a seminar that positions Caribbean thought as a generative ground for rethinking spatial theory. The course engages archipelagic thinking and concepts such as relation, opacity, and repetition to examine how colonial histories and environmental precarity shape spatial knowledge. The summer period will be dedicated to strengthening the course’s theoretical framework, reorganizing the syllabus around archipelagic epistemologies, and preparing an annotated reader of primary texts. Research travel to Puerto Rico will support engagement with scholars and writers whose work informs contemporary Caribbean spatial thought. This work supports the integration of Caribbean perspectives into architectural education and contributes to broader discussions in the humanities on how knowledge is produced across colonial and diasporic contexts in the Caribbean.

Research 2026

Amanda Daniela Cortez, Anthropology
“The Politics of Multispecies Relating: Indigeneity, Gender, and Photography Tourism in the Peruvian Andes” 

With HRI summer funding, I will spend five weeks in Cusco, Peru to co-develop my ethnographic book manuscript The Politics of Multispecies Relating: Indigeneity, Gender, and Photography Tourism in the Peruvian Andes. The book traces the lives of Quechua women and their llama, alpaca, and sheep kin as they navigate the politics of Indigeneity and multispecies relating in photography tourism. I will workshop the first two chapters from my manuscript across a series of focus groups with my co-thinkers—the Quechua women who participated in my dissertation research data collection. During these focus groups, we will discuss the main argument of my book and each chapter, work through the main ideas, and review photographs for the manuscript. These discussions are intended to ensure that my co-thinkers have input on the outcomes of the research and that the book aligns with their visions for the work. 

Paige Cunningham Caldarella, Dance
“Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace as a Departure Point for Contemporary Reflection” 

With support from the HRI Summer Faculty Fellowship, I will engage in choreographic research specifically exploring Merce Cunningham’s seminal 1958 piece, Summerspace, as both a historical anchor and a contemporary provocation. I performed Summerspace during my time with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and received coaching in it from Carolyn Brown, a longtime leading Cunningham dancer and founding member of the Cunningham Company. Sitting at the intersection of ballet and modern dance, Summerspace offers a container for considering how multiple movement languages can coexist within a single choreographic structure. Guiding this research are several questions: How can Summerspace be re-encountered today through re-staging and new responsive choreography? Could a work that once read as buoyant, airy, and quietly radical now read as charged, unpredictable, or quietly eruptive? In what ways can engagement with artistic legacies address current social, political, and aesthetic concerns and what tensions underlie seemingly ordered systems like ballet? 

Alisa Hardy, Communication
“Speculative Remembrance: Naming Breonna Taylor in a Mediated World”

Speculative Remembrance examines the public memory of Breonna Taylor across digitally mediated environments in the afterlife of state-sanctioned violence. This fellowship will support the next phase of the book project by funding travel to physical memory sites in the South, including an archive, a mural, and a portrait, all created in honor of Taylor's memory. This travel will allow me to study how digital and place-based forms of remembrance operate in relation to one another.

Mania Taher, Art & Design
“Shifting Dwellings: Worldmaking of Bangladeshi Immigrant Women in New York”

This fellowship will support fieldwork this summer to expand the chapters of the current book manuscript, which will examine the resettlement experiences of Bangladeshi immigrant women in New York from the 1970s to the present. Through ethnographic research on domestic spaces and Bangladeshi neighborhoods, I aim to deepen understanding of how migration influences identity and agency, especially regarding gender, with everyday spaces and object practices playing an essential role. The temporal pattern of my participants' activities, both inside and outside their dwellings, reflects a non-Western perspective on their placemaking during their displacement. By exploring how Bangladeshi women blur the boundaries between public and private through embodied and transcultural practices, this research argues that conventional spatial norms are inadequate to fully understand the complexities of immigrant women's place construction during resettlement.