Current Fellows
Jump to: Interseminars Initiative | Humanities Without Walls Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Humanities | Summer Faculty Fellows | CHCI-ACLS Fellow
HRI Campus Fellows 2025–26:
Story and Place
Faculty Fellows
Serouj Aprahamian, Dance
“‘Showtime!’: Dancing in the New York City UnderGround”
Acrobatic dance performances have become commonplace on the New York City subway. But what few people realize is that such performers are not just some random breakdancers soliciting money from them on the train. Rather, they are part of a growing new dance culture with thousands of adherents throughout the five boroughs and, increasingly, throughout the world. Utilizing movement and textual analysis, this project investigates the dual development of this new dance movement in informal community spaces and on the trains. What narratives are embodied within this dance and what relationships between place, performance, and power lie within it?
Ryan Griffis, Art and Design
“When the Landscape Recognizable Today Was Shaped”
“When the Landscape Recognizable Today Was Shaped” is a multi-media artwork that focuses on wetlands in the Central Illinois River Valley, specifically the Emiquon Preserve, an experimental restored wetland on the former Thompson Lake Drainage District. Combining documentary interviews, landscape imagery, and speculative poetry and visuals, the project asks, “What is at stake in restoration and conservation practices within a regional ecology that has been so completely transformed by settler-colonialism and industrial extraction?”
Rachelle Grossman, Comparative and World Literature
“Afterwords: Yiddish in the Postwar World”
Through an analysis of “world making” in postwar Yiddish literature, this work proposes a paradigm for understanding the politics of cultural creation after destruction. From its inception as a modern literature, Yiddish was a diasporic culture defined by migration. After the Holocaust, Yiddish cultural activists, writers, and readers around the world confronted immense loss, which profoundly transformed Yiddish culture and its constituent geographies. This project understands literature in two ways: as a set of texts and also as a transnational system of institutions. I argue that literature was crucial in establishing ways of understanding the world, conceived of both as a memory space captured in literary worlds and as a contemporary world-system in which books circulated between postwar communities.
Amy Hassinger, Creative Writing/English
“DIMMENING, a linked collection of stories”
Through a series of short eco-fictions linked by locale, Dimmening reveals the deep interconnection of place and story. An invented word for winter’s early dark, “dimmening” evokes an awareness of mortality and the diminishment of wilderness. Set in the micro-urban forest of a fictional west Urbana, the stories depict women navigating the challenges of caretaking, aging, and environmental change. The drama of a barred owl family nesting in the neighborhood park unfolds in parallel across the collection. Following the etymology of eco- (Greek for house or dwelling), Dimmening imagines a network of interspecies relationships that characterize this shared home.
Simi Kang, Asian American Studies
“Against Refugee Resilience: On Restoration & Environmental Sacrifice at the Ocean’s Edge”
My book-in-progress, Refugee Environmentalism, focuses on the political and ecological impacts of state-driven environmental management on Vietnamese American shrimping families. I argue that state policy compels shrimpers to be ‘models’ of resilience, or survival in-spite-of, given their refugeeism from Việt Nam, rebuilding post-
Katrina, and following the BP oil catastrophe. Rendering shrimpers ‘resilient refugees’ allows decision-makers to at once ‘forget’ the community’s needs following disaster and blame shrimpers if they can’t survive this artificial dearth of support. The fellowship will allow me to receive feedback on key chapters to complete a full manuscript, due to Duke and UW presses spring 2026.
Daniel Nabil Maroun, French and Italian
“The Politics of Kinship: Writing Queerness, Filiation, and Race in Contemporary France”
A reexamination of the story and legitimacy of family as a social construct in France and how different queer populations reconstruct what constitutes a family through new forms of kinship that are not tied to filiation. The project explores a growing social anxiety in France around what constitutes a family and who belongs in what is conceived of as the larger national “family,” i.e.: Frenchness. This study examines two distinct populations often targeted as threats: gay men and queer immigrants whose literary works shine light on how these populations supplant traditional ideologies of “family.”
Mirelsie Velázquez, 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”
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
Kirsten Barker, Music
“Max of the Antarctic: Stories of ‘Wilderness’ in Music and Word”
Music can tell stories. English composer Peter Maxwell Davies wrote four pieces of music based on experiences from his visit to Antarctica in the late 1990s. Exploring the relationship between the British Antarctic Survey’s sponsorship of the trip, British Antarctic imperialism, and British environmental history, my project illuminates entanglements between British Antarctic agendas and Davies’s music and writings. Specifically, by engaging a cross-disciplinary framework and interrogating both Davies’s music and diaries, my work provides unique perspectives on how Davies experienced the southernmost continent as “wilderness” and encapsulated both real and imagined Antarcticas in music and personal accounts of the trip.
Debayudh Chatterjee, English
“Specters of Communism at the End of History: Reimagining Resistance in Progressive Indian Literature and Cinema (1989–2014)”
What stories emerge from places rapidly transformed after the global collapse of socialism? Is there a lingering sense of mourning and melancholy for a lost world or a sustained interest in reconstructing progressive visions? My dissertation examines an eclectic set of novels, films, documentaries, and nonfiction produced in English, Bengali, and Hindi to argue that the leftist Indian intelligentsia brought about a radical reconfiguration of cultural praxis by drawing upon memories of the Naxalite movement (1967-72) to herald a new regime of resistance against global and national mobilizations of late capitalism and rising religious extremism.
Asmaa Elsayed, Education Policy, Organization & Leadership
“Between Shadows and Stories: Navigating the Physical and Digital to Redefine Womanhood and Reclaim Belonging for Minoritized Women in the Global South”
This research examines how vulnerable and minoritized women in the global south navigate, resist, and reconstitute identity, belonging, and citizenship under conditions of extreme constraint. Specifically, I investigate the emancipatory role of digital technologies in identity reconfiguration, social capital formation, feminist activism, and informal education among these women. I explore how participants use online platforms as ‘third places’ (Burbules, 2013) to resist invisibilization and construct counter-narratives. I document how participants reimagine the boundaries of womanhood and citizenship, and how communities long framed as marginal actively reshape the center, challenging narratives of deviance and advancing new forms of collective visibility, dignity, and belonging. Particular attention is given to how participants negotiate the meanings of “woman” and “citizen” amid tensions between global discourses and local sociopolitical realities, facilitated through ‘technologically mediated transnational networks’ (Moghadam, 2024).
Stanislav Khudzik, History
“1905 After 1917: The Bolshevik Archive, Oral Storytelling, and Historical Media in Early Soviet Leningrad, 1921–1926”
The 1905 Revolution became central to the socialist imagination in the late Russian Empire, but the testimonies of its participants largely disappeared from public discussion after a period of freedom in 1905-1907. This dissertation explores the efforts of the Leningrad Commission for the History of the October Revolution and the Russian Communist Party in the early 1920s to revisit the history of 1905 by collecting oral testimonies from veterans and using them to produce media, from academic publications to films. This study reconstructs the impact of oral culture on Soviet history writing, focusing on the gap between modern media and storytelling.
Emerson Parker Pehl, English
“Colonial Unknowing in the Collective Unconscious: The Reverberations of Colonial Expropriation from the Archives of Psychoanalytic Thought”
This dissertation provides a queer Indigenous critique of psychoanalysis as a cultural theory and the influential predecessor to contemporary therapeutic theories. By beginning with C. G. Jung, I contend with how his conceptualization of a “collective” human psyche has influenced Gloria Anzaldúa and Gina Ogden’s theories and methods to understanding sex, sexuality, and gender through colonial expropriation. By tracing this Jungian genealogical branch of psychoanalysis across disciplines, this project seeks to provide a transdisciplinary analysis that elucidates a type of colonial extraction that continues to reverberate from the earliest archives of psychoanalysis into the contemporary.
Ilaria Strocchia, Spanish and Portuguese
“Flowing Histories: Examining the Role of Water in Shaping Urban Spaces and Identities Across Cultures”
This dissertation project investigates how bodies of water—rivers, lakes, and the sea—have historically shaped urban places in Valencia (Spain), Mexico City, and Naples (Italy) while simultaneously forging their stories. Focusing on the Spanish colonial legacy of spatial
rationalization and environmental degradation, it explores how these dynamics are represented in six novels (19th–21st centuries). Through an interdisciplinary approach connecting environmental humanities, urban studies, and literary analysis, the research examines water as both subject and metaphor to challenge urbanization’s notions of control and stability, revealing how stories and places intersect to shape socio-cultural narratives and territorial transformation.
Priyanka Zylstra, History
“‘It was called Liberation’: South Asian Women’s Activism in Multi-Racial Britain, 1979-1994”
I examine how South Asian women in Britain during the 1970s-80s resisted racialized and gendered state violence. South Asian women in Britain experienced unjust immigration practices, police brutality, labour exploitation, and gender violence. I study the discursive,
creative, and embodied forms of protest that South Asian women employed to counter the state’s productions of South Asian womanhood. Activists and community organizations asserted belonging and political power through claiming and creating spaces in their community. Such acts of resistance redefined Britishness, belonging, and womanhood in the ‘newly postcolonial’ state.
Director's Fellows 2025-26
Toby Beauchamp, Gender and Women's Studies
Toby Beauchamp is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, and affiliate faculty in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at Illinois. Trained in the interdisciplinary humanities, his primary research and teaching areas are trans studies, disability studies, and feminist pedagogies. His first book, Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices (Duke University Press, 2019), examined post-9/11 state surveillance and the problem of visibility in trans political work. His current book project, Trans Studies for Grim Times, situates the fight for trans life within a larger struggle against authoritarian governance and fascist ideology, proposing that trans studies offers us vital resources to define new parameters of political discourse.
Christopher Freeburg, English
Christopher Freeburg currently holds the inaugural Presidential Humanities and Social Sciences Endowed Chair at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is an award-winning author of three scholarly books and numerous articles including, Melville in the Idea of Blackness (Cambridge UP, 2012), Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (University of Virginia Press, 2017), and Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death (Duke University Press, 2021). Recently, he completed a book, Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life which is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2026. He holds a B.A. from Xavier University of Louisiana, an M.A. from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has received numerous academic awards, fellowships, and titles, most recently, President of the Melville Society, the John A. and Grace W. Nicholson Professorship, University Scholar, Center for Advanced Study Associate, and Conrad Humanities Scholar, as well as the Hennig Cohen Prize, from The Melville Society, 2012.
Natalia Lira, Latina/Latino Studies
Natalie Lira is an interdisciplinary scholar who examines the politics of reproduction and histories of medicine in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include the politics of reproduction, histories of medicine, and the ways that struggles for racial and reproductive justice intersect. In her new book, Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1910-1950s, Dr. Lira combines insights and analytical frameworks from Latinx Studies, Disability Studies, and feminist scholarship on reproduction to examine Mexican-origin people's experiences of eugenic sterilization and institutionalization in California during the first half of the 20th century. Analyzing a vast archive, Dr. Lira reveals how political concerns over Mexican immigration—particularly ideas about the low intelligence, deviant sexuality, and inherent criminality of the "Mexican race"—shaped decisions regarding Mexican-origin youth's treatment and reproductive future. Laboratory of Deficiency documents how Mexican-origin people sought out creative resistance to institutional control and offers insight into how race, disability, and social deviance have been called upon to justify certain individuals' confinement and reproductive constraint in the name of public health and progress. Dr. Lira is also the co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab (SSJL).
Anke Pinkert, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Anke Pinkert is a scholar of modern German literature, film, and culture, with a focus on memory studies and social activism. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has taught in the United States and Germany, including at the University of Chicago, Macalester College, and the University of Leipzig. She is a Professor of German and Media & Cinema Studies, and Conrad Humanities Scholar for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In addition, she holds appointments at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Since 2009, she has collaborated with a group of scholars who co-founded the interdisciplinary Initiative of Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies at Illinois. Professor Pinkert’s research and teaching is situated within two major tracks— memory studies with a focus on post-Holocaust and post-communist Germany and theories and practice of the Humanities. Paying particular attention to the aftermath of two turning points in modern German and European history, “1945” and “1989,” her scholarship examines aesthetic and political responses to collective feelings of loss and trauma. Remembering 1989: Future Archives of Public Protest (University of Chicago Press, 2024) challenges the dominance of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s unification in global memory in the last decades. The project received support from an IPRH (now HRI) New Horizons Summer Faculty Research Fellowship and the Center for Advanced Study. Her new research project Memory Ecologies examines seawater as medium and archive in contexts of forced migration. In her second major area of inquiry, Anke Pinkert explores recent shifts in Humanities education, activism, and research. At the University of Illinois, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on 20th/21st century German literature, film, and culture; critical theory; Holocaust representations; and mass incarceration in film and media.
Interseminars Initiative, 2024–25
Faculty Conveners
Erik S. McDuffie is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the award-winning monograph Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke University Press, 2011). His forthcoming book is titled The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the U.S. Heartland, and Global Black Freedom (Duke University Press). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and American Council for Learned Societies. His teaching has consistently won recognition from the Center for Teaching Excellence. He is a co-PI for the Africana World Studies at the University of Illinois and Urbana and University of Illinois Chicago grant funded through the UI System Presidential Initiative: Expanding the Impact of the Arts and Humanities. He holds the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation Faculty fellowship. His professional service is reflected in his active involvement in national and international professional societies and associations and his contributions toward developing scholarly research. He serves on the editorial boards of the University of Illinois Press, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. From 2017 to 2019, he served as the vice president of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). A sixth generation Midwesterner, his family hails from the United States, Canada, and St. Kitts.
Gilberto Rosas is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he chairs the latter. With interests in “the state,” racism and its broad complexities, critical ethnography, and experimental writing, Rosas is author of the award-winning Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier (Duke University Press, 2012) and the recently published Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), and other well-received work. He is also the editor of The Border Reader along with Mireya Loza (Duke University Press, 2023). Professor Rosas is active in Immigrant Rights movements both locally and nationally, and regularly gives expert testimony on behalf of people in asylum and related legal proceedings, and has been active in an innovative scholarship collaboration addressing health inequities.
Gisela Sin is associate professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois. She studies political institutions with an emphasis on the strategic elements of separation of powers and is currently working on presidential veto politics. She is the author of the award-winning book Separation of Powers and Legislative Organization (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and the coauthor of Congreso, Presidencia y Justicia en Argentina (TEMAS, 1999). Her research has been published in the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, the Journal of Legislative Studies, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations, Studies in American Political Development, the Journal of Politics in Latin America, Perpectives on Politics, and Public Choice. She has presented her work at universities throughout Latin America and Europe and was a scholar in residence at Universidad Católica de Chile, Instituto Iberoamericano Universidad de Salamanca, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, and a Fulbright Scholar in the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Universidad del Salvador in Argentina.
Graduate Fellows
Yasmine Adams
Degree Program: PhD in Anthropology
Areas of study: Sociocultural Anthropology, Black Futurity, Race and Racism, Imagery, Social and Traditional Media, Cultural Performance, and Digital Activism.
Grace Eunhyn Bae
Degree Program: PhD in Art Education
Areas of study: Art Education, Art Therapy, and Community-Based Art
Jose Figueroa Díaz
Degree Program: PhD in Spanish, Literature and Culture
Areas of study: Hispanic literatures and cultures
Omar Agustin Hernandez
Degree Program: PhD in Anthropology
Areas of study: Development and Dependence in the Caribbean, the Anthropology of Sport, and the future(s) of Socialism in the Global South
Samantha Jenae Jones
Degree Program: MFA in Design for Responsible Innovation
Areas of study: Racism, Body Autonomy, Gender Bias and Social Inequality, Afrofuturism, Identity, Digital Fabrication, Illustration, Critical Art Based Theory
Nik Owens
Degree Program: MFA in Dance
Areas of study: Inequities in the Politics of Heroism, Black Superheroes and Afrofuturism, Black Studies, Queer Studies
Ann Xiaoxu Pei
Degree Program: PhD in Comparative Literature
Areas of study: Environmental Humanities, Memory Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Leonardo Ventura
Degree Program: PhD in History
Areas of study: African Diaspora, Black Studies, Afro Brazilian Studies and Afro Brazilian intellectual history
Tooma H. Zaghloul
Degree Program: PhD in Urban and Regional Planning
Areas of study: Critical urban theory, alternative methods, resistance and resilience practices in spaces of refuge, mobilities of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), citizenship beyond geopolitical borders
Humanities Without Walls Postdoctoral Research Associate in Public Humanities
Jordan Woodward, PhD
English— Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy, The Ohio State University
Jordan Woodward joins the HWW team in fall 2024 as the Postdoctoral Research Associate in Public Humanities. In her HWW role, Woodward will spend the two-year term in residence at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, participating for the first year of appointment in the yearlong Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Fellows Seminar. Woodward will also pursue a community-based research project rooted in the HWW grant’s guiding methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution.
Summer Faculty Fellows
Course Development
Wei (Windy) Zhao, Architecture
ARCH 572: Place Making in Rural China
A required design studio at the graduate level, invites students to offer innovative and sustainable planning and design solutions tailored to local stakeholders while respecting cultural identity, addressing present needs, and ensuring long-term viability. The Course Development Grant will support a preparatory trip in Summer 2025, allowing me to explore selected villages in Songyang County, Zhejiang Province, and examine Xu Tiantian’s rural revitalization projects in the region. This trip will not only enhance my ability to guide the next iteration of the studio but also provide valuable insights into potential research directions—particularly exploring how elite architecture can contribute to and coexist with the vernacular cultural landscape.
Pilar Martínez-Quiroga, Spanish and Portuguese
SPAN 320, Cultural Studies, II: Facing Diversity: 50 Years of Democracy, Spain 1975-2025
"This year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco. The current Spanish government has decided to celebrate it with a series of events and activities under the title “Spain in freedom: 50 years.” I will attend many of these activities in Madrid, such as the film series ‘Images for a Country in Freedom’ scheduled for the entire year 2025 at the Spanish Film Library; or the exhibition “Art in the fight for freedom. Celebrating the Spanish Constitution of 1978” at the Congress of Deputies. My goal is to create a new topic for my SPAN 320 course, tentative titled “Facing Diversity: 50 Years of Democracy, Spain 1975-2025”. The course will focus on the challenges that Spain has faced in these 50 years of democracy, paying attention to the issue of diversity: peripheral nationalisms and languages, especially Catalonia; immigration, non-white Spain, LGTBI+ communities, etc."
Research 2025
Mukhtar Ali, Religion
“The Compendium of Mysteries: A Study of Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī’s Jāmiʿ al-Asrār”
My research is an in-depth study of Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī’s (d. 790/1387–1388) Jāmiʿ al-Asrār wa Manbaʿ al-Anwār (“A Compendium of Mysteries and Source of Lights”). Jāmiʿ al-Asrār stands out as a masterful synthesis of Ibn ʿArabī’s philosophical Sufism, reinterpreted within the cosmological framework of Twelver Shīʿism. More than just a historical document, this seminal work provides profound insights into the intellectual currents of its time and serves as a vital bridge to understanding key medieval Islamic philosophical traditions.
Nikolai A. Alvarado, Geography & GIS
“Counter-Cartographies of Migration and Urban Informality: Nicaraguan Rap as Living Archive of Radical Place-Making in Costa Rica"
Migrant communities are often mapped external to the nation through material and symbolic borders. How do we create counter-maps that unsettle dominant cartographic representations of migrant spaces and where would we find this geo-spatial-corporeal data? My research looks at rap music produced by Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica as testimonios of places lived otherwise. This summer, I will travel to La Carpio to collaborate with migrant rappers and community members to develop counter-cartographic renderings that visualize how artistic practices reimagine migrant communities as central to producing urban spaces, even as they are excluded from official geographies. This community-based approach will advance humanities-centered counter-mapping methodologies that recognize artistic expressions as valid sources of geographic knowledge while challenging internal borders through creative practice.
Victoria Austen, Classics
“Landscaped Commemorabilia: The Mausoleum of Augustus as a Gardened Monument”
I will be utilizing the HRI Summer Fellowship funds to conduct archival research on the history of the Mausoleum of Augustus at the British School at Rome during summer 2025. This research will contribute to my second book project, which explores how the Mausoleum, as a ‘gardened’ tomb monument, acts as a particularly rich form of materialised memory —or commemorabilia (following Casey 2000)— since the ephemeral and often unstable nature of plants enhances the potential for a multiplicity of experiences and attitudes.
Deepasri Baul, History
“An Aversion to Progress: the cultural habitus of north Indian caste-histories”
The project draws attention to wide networks of vernacular histories that circulate outside of formal, English-language, academic spaces in present-day India. These texts represent both alternative conceptions of history as caste-genealogies, as well as dubious Hinduised narratives of the nation's past. Through a careful reading of some of these texts, and by locating them within their archive, I will trace the larger contours and inner logic of the cultural universe within which such texts may be understood. I suggest that these histories are not evidence-based accounts of the past. Their goal instead is to provide a stable and meaningful identity for upper-caste Hindu young men frustrated by the unachievable prosperity once promised by neo-liberal globalization in India.
Eduardo Ledesma, Spanish and Portuguese
“The Uses and Effects of Artificial Intelligence in Latin American Cinema”
With the HRI Summer Faculty Fellowship, I will complete research and write a chapter for my new book project about the use of AI in the Latin American film industry. Currently AI is being deployed in every aspect of filmmaking, from advertising and promotion to script writing, pre- and post-production, and filming and editing, questioning the concept of authorship and displacing scriptwriters, voice actors, film editors and other industry workers. This summer I will focus on reading scholarly articles, trade publications and viewing films, and on writing the first chapter about AI in the Argentine film industry. Future chapters will examine Chile, Brazil and Mexico – these four nations lead the Latin American region in the application of AI technology in the film industry.
Kim McKean, Theatre
“Creating New Plays: Conversations on New Play Development with Directors, Playwrights, Dramaturgs and other Theatre Makers”
Creating New Plays: Conversations on New Play Development with Directors, Playwrights, Dramaturgs, and Other Theatre Makers is a new book that invites readers into the development process for new plays, offering an in-depth look at the strategies and practices theatre-makers use to bring new work to life. Each chapter focuses on a specific theme or challenge in developing new work and features candid interviews with leading industry professionals who share their insights and approaches. The book investigates a wide range of practices—from early collaboration to production—and imagines more sustainable ways forward for creative partnerships.
Leonard Cornell McKinnis II, African American Studies and Religion
“Everyday Muslim: An Ethnographic Study on the Nation of Islam”
This Summer HRI project explores lived religion among believers in the Nation of Islam. Turning to ethnographic methods, "Everyday Muslim" focuses our attention on material religion and material spirituality. It considers the ordinary, indeed the quotidian, ways in which religion is practiced and attended to in the lives of Nation of Islam followers. Turning to food, dress, and structures, this project centers religious practice as a way of understanding the intersection of Blackness and Islam in this Black religion.
James Pilgrim, Art History
“Art and Environmentalism in Renaissance Venice”
With the support of the HRI, I will spend two months in Venice, Italy, conducting archival research in support of a new project "Art and Environmentalism in Early Modern Italy." The initial focus of my attention will be a manuscript entitled “A Venetian codex of circa 1600 regarding bodies of water and forests"—the product of an obscure landowner from Belluno who was hoping to persuade the Venetian government of the necessity of developing a program of reforestation and monitoring in the Valbelluna, a mountain valley located some ninety kilometers north of Venice. Of particular interest to me is the fact that the manuscript is composed of twenty-five pencil and watercolor images of trees, forests, mountains, rivers, agricultural areas and irrigation canals, logging operations and timber mills which offer remarkable insight into the sophistication of early modern Venetian environmental knowledge. Images, the author seems to have recognized, offered a powerfully persuasive medium with which to communicate the fact that the society and environment of early modern Venice were inextricably intertwined.
Emily Tarconish, Special Education
"The lived experiences of disabled students in postsecondary education classrooms"
For this project, we will use reflexive thematic analysis to inductively analyze in-depth interviews with postsecondary students with disabilities. Interviews focused on students' experiences of accessible and inaccessible learning and their views on how postsecondary education can become more inclusive. The study and analysis is framed within a disability studies in education theoretical framework.
CHCI-ACLS Fellow
Eric S. Godoy, Philosophy
“Public Power: Ethical Energy and Democracy's Role in a Just Transition”
Eric is associate professor of philosophy at Illinois State University. He is visiting HRI during his sabbatical year to develop his project on energy democracy. This is not a single policy framework or social movement but a constellation of ideas which cite democratic power as an essential feature of just renewable energy systems. However, what is 'democracy' and what promise does it offer of justice in the context of energy transition? Could it avoid the ethical problems of the current fossil-fuel energy system, or will it exacerbate them? This project unites the normative, theoretical work of environmental ethics and politics with the empirical field of energy studies to better understand and defend the virtues of energy democracy. ISU faculty profile | Professor Godoy's website
Research Clusters
The HRI Research Clusters initiative enables faculty and graduate students in the humanities and arts from the Urbana campus to develop questions or subjects of inquiry that require or would be enhanced by collaborative work.