Current Fellows
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HRI Campus Fellows 2024–25: Think Again...
Faculty Fellows
Angela Aguayo, Media and Cinema Studies
“Collective Matters: Documentary Film Practice and Public Engagement in the US, 1970-Present”
Documentary production includes a century of experiments with screening and exhibition practices as public engagement. Media makers use the tools of recording, archiving, collecting, and community collaboration to address social problems and circulate vital knowledge. Collective Matters explores an overlooked history of documentary practices in the United States as media of collaborative public engagement. This project asks: How does the documentary impulse facilitate organizing around community needs? Drawing upon research in media, communication, and cultural studies, and informed by interviews with media workers, filmmakers and activists, the book considers how community-centered documentary storytelling provides frameworks for larger civic sector conversations.
Toby C. Beauchamp , Gender and Women’s Studies
“Trans Studies for Grim Times”
What strategies can best support trans people today, particularly when we understand anti-trans political projects to be intertwined with fascist and white supremacist ideologies? This short book considers three prominent examples—the appeal to medical expertise, the denial of regret, and the invocation of parental rights—to explore the ways that many trans-supportive arguments remain constrained by the legislative arena and ensnared in authoritarian frameworks. The book proposes that trans studies offers us crucial resources for defining new parameters of political and public discourse, situating the defense of trans life within an explicitly anti-authoritarian politics.
Angela Calcaterra , American Indian Studies
“Bearing Arms: US Gun Violence and Indigenous Relationality”
This project analyzes American gun violence in the context of US settler colonial history and Indigenous relationality, ways of being centered on forms of interconnectedness. Indigenous people, often on the frontlines of weaponized state violence, have long analyzed the ways objects and technologies can intervene in human activity and inspire or disrupt reciprocal relationships. Bearing Arms examines historical and recent literary and cultural texts to analyze white settlers’ depictions of gun violence alongside Indigenous approaches to weapons that challenge American gun logics and laws, compelling a new understanding of American gun violence.
Jamie Jones , English
“The Affordances of Energy: Imagining Fossil Fuels in the 19th and 20th Centuries”
My second book project, currently titled The Affordances of Energy, will reconstruct the myriad ways that nineteenth and early twentieth-century U.S. writers and artists imagined fossil fuels as energy, substances, and forms. I will delineate early fossil fuel imaginaries by working through a diverse corpus of texts and objects from U.S. petroleum and gas booms. Before the extraction fossil fuels got yoked either to economic growth or to injustice and climate disaster, other ideas about energy proliferated. In The Affordances of Energy, I locate these ideas and think again about what energy was and might be.
Charlesia McKinney, English
“Pandemic Pleasure Pedagogies: Black-American Women’s Strategies of Survival”
While there is literature on the violences Black women historically and currently endure, Black women’s pleasure politics are understudied, understated, and undertheorized—even more so since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S., Black-American women face a paradoxical public perception of being invisible and hypervisible, of being prudish yet also hypersexual. Rooted in Black feminist praxis, Pandemic Pleasure Pedagogies is an interdisciplinary enterprise which emphasizes the exigencies for communal and individual pleasure education. Amplifying phenomenologies of Black-American women's pleasure, this work illuminates that pleasure and pedagogy, alike, are political, theoretical, rhetorical, empirical, and enhanced by literacy.
Edward O’Byrn, African American Studies
“Existence Precedes Enslavement”
Existence Precedes Enslavement reconstructs the lives of Courtney and her son Joseph Godfrey who endured and survived American chattel slavery in the Northwest Territory during the 1800s. Drawing on scholarly work in traditions of Black existential philosophy, Black feminism, and Black humanism, this manuscript demonstrates how a focus on the agency of enslaved people complicates narratives about enslavement and liberation in the region. I argue that a philosophical reconstruction of their stories emphasizes the importance of their interior lives, community building, the strife faced when approaching liberation, and the importance of continuing the fight against antiblackness after attaining legal freedom.
Alexia Williams, Religion and African American Studies
“Race to Sainthood: Roman Catholicism & the U.S. Racial Imagination.”
This project examines the discourse and aesthetic work inspired by African American candidates for sainthood to understand how Roman Catholicism has operated as a site of political organizing and cultural production for black Americans. Inspired by the genre “lives of saints” writing, it analyzes how stories about African American candidates for sainthood are told, and the local histories of race, gender, and migration that emerge from them. Williams argues that as categories of celebrity secular sainthood and Roman Catholic sainthood overlap, Roman Catholicism maintains its influence as a race-making institution in the U.S., even in spaces traditionally seen as secular.
Graduate Student Fellows
Alana Ackerman, Anthropology
“Rethinking War Across Borders: Violence, Refuge, and the ‘Colombian Armed Conflict’ in Quito, Ecuador”
How is the violence of war—particularly “civil war”—reproduced across international borders, in spaces and at times of supposed peace and refuge? I argue that war exceeds the spatial boundaries that supposedly contain it, frequently manifesting as surprising “irruptions” (Aretxaga, 1997) of violence between persecutors and refugees across international borders. Through an ethnography of the violence that Colombian refugees experience in Quito, Ecuador, this project challenges dominant narratives about how, where, and when war occurs, and contributes to interdisciplinary fields of scholarship such as the anthropology of war and violence, and critical refugee studies.
Chelsea Birchmier, Psychology
“‘Searching for the Nexus’ Between Two Movements: Fight for $15 and Possibilities for Black Worker Struggle in St. Louis, Missouri”
My dissertation reimagines the 2014 Ferguson Uprising by including Fight for $15 fast-food workers, whose central role in the uprising has been neglected in dominant narratives. While Ferguson offered the opportunity for Black liberation and labor movements to coalesce, I argue the inability to maintain a local movement center to coordinate resources contributed to the fracturing of struggles. Bringing frameworks and methodologies from history and sociology into conversation with community psychology analyses bridging macro- and micro-systems allows me to think again about these intertwined struggles and lay the groundwork for social movement praxis capable of contending with contemporary challenges.
Sharayah L. Cochran, Art History
“Dangerous Photographs: What’s the harm in documentary?”
“Dangerous Photographs” revisits the concept of weaponized images and examines their injurious potential. Rather than restricting the violence of photography to the category of a weapon, “dangerous photographs” provides an expanded way of looking that scrutinizes the violence inherent to the photographic medium. I argue that the latent danger of photographs comes into view in images that can be considered too close, too far, and over-exposed. Moreover, I propose that photographs that do not exist are among the most dangerous, yet in their absence these non-existent photographs index the physical, political, and social harms they cause.
Anna Sophia Flood, English
“Slavery’s Eerie Presence: The Graphic Gothic’s Capturing of Dark Histories and Distorted Futures”
The Afro-Gothic, as a process of literature, is identifiable through its reckoning with the dark history of slavery. My project propels this process forward and introduces the Graphic Gothic, to investigate speculative graphic novels. I define the Graphic Gothic as the visual employment of darkness and obscurity to affectively entice audiences. Each graphic novel implicated in this project, reimagines a moment in history or narrative, and employs this visual mode to demonstrate a new approach to the story. This project argues that the Afro Graphic Gothic has an innate capability to reconcile corrupted histories through authentic presentation.
Lázaro García Angulo, Spanish and Portuguese
“‘Yet Another Woman-Man’: Representations of Gender Nonconformity in Spain, 1880-1939”
My dissertation explores the representation of gender nonconformity in Spanish literature and culture from 1880 to 1940. By examining both canonical and forgotten literary texts , as well as archival material s such as newspapers and criminal records, I argue that gender nonconformity was far from a niche subject : it was instead an ever present theme in the cultural production of this period This project seek s to analyze the multiple , and sometimes contradictory narratives that developed in diverse medi a around the subject of gender nonconformity, and their evolving relationship to questions of race, class, modernity , and national identity.
August D. Hoffman, Anthropology
“The Bite that Binds: Care, Violence and Liminality in Wolf Sanctuary”
This ethnographic research rethinks practices of care, communication, and relationality in wildlife sanctuaries in the hope of cultivating just multispecies communities. It specifically examines economies of sanctuary for captive-born wild canids who occupy liminal states between domestic and wild, thus confounding forms of biopolitical control based on Western nature-culture binaries. In addition to understanding the potentialities and contradictions of interspecies love and solidarity that shape human and nonhuman identities, it asks how racialization and coloniality permeate these relations. Finally, it (re)interrogates theories of animal domestication and humanity’s co-evolution with canids, offering a counternarrative to Eurocentric and anthropocentric ideologies regarding nonhuman life.
Nathan Tanner, Education Policy, Organization & Leadership
“Document-Based and Oral Histories of Diné Experiences in the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program, 1945–2000”
My dissertation contributes to a burgeoning historiography concerned with education and schooling in the trans-Mississippi West during the 20th century and accounts for the ways education and schooling have been utilized as tools of settler colonial state-building. Having secured permission from the Navajo Nation’s Human Research Review Board, this research relies on archival documents and the oral histories of Diné adults who were removed from their families and land and enrolled in the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program as children. My study resists historically colonial approaches to conducting research on Indigenous peoples and privileges research with Indigenous communities. Website: Oral Histories of the Indian Student Placement Program
Interseminars Initiative, 2024–25
Note: 2023–24 Interseminars Initiative project information available here
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
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
Amy Clay, French and Italian
French 103 and 104: Intermediate French I and II
Amy Clay revised French 103 and 104 (Intermediate French I and II) to increase student engagement with authentic resources from French and Francophone cultures. The primary goal is to integrate a wider variety of genres that represent diverse perspectives and practices in French-speaking cultures. Her forthcoming open access textbook and all course materials developed as an HRI Summer Faculty Fellow will be freely available at U. of I. and nationally, in hopes of making French language courses more inclusive, representative of diverse viewpoints, and financially accessible.
Cynthia Kocher, Theatre
Theatre 401: Broadway Stage Management
The HRI Fellowship Funds was be used to develop a course called THEA 401: Broadway Stage Management. This course will culminate in a trip to New York City, where students will get to experience first-hand everything we've been exploring all semester. The Stage Management Program currently has courses in Regional Theatre, Opera, Dance and Events Stage Management—and the missing piece is Stage Management for Broadway. We currently have recent stage management alumni working on several Broadway Shows, including the recently opened Cabaret and Heart of Rock and Roll.
Daniel Leon, Classics
CLCV 250: Sports and Society in Ancient Greece and Rome
Professor Leon researched the logistics of turning a successful on-campus course on Greco-Roman sports (CLCV 250) into a short-term faculty-led course in Greece. This will involve visiting archaeological sites such as Olympia and Delphi as well as modern sports facilities, speaking with academic and business partners, and constructing a feasible agenda for delivering a high-quality educational experience for entry level students.
Research 2024
Angela J. Aguayo, Media and Cinema Studies
“Collective Matters: The History of Documentary Production in the US, 1970- present”
Over the summer, Professor Aguayo completed research for two chapters of her upcoming book manuscript. One chapter will focus on race, violence and youth media production, addressing curriculum that encourages youth to articulate a world on their own terms. The second chapter will examine documentary and sexual consent education, rethinking ethics from sexual education films to the counter-narratives circulating on social media.
Laura Hetrick, Art Education, Art and Design
“Auto-ethnography of an Autistic Professor: Navigating a Neurodiverse Academic Life”
This award supported research preparation for my solo authored book about being an autistic professor that I will begin drafting in fall 2024 during use of an approved Humanities Release Time award. Specifically, I will travel to a United States Society for Education through Art (USSEA) regional conference in Santa Fe, NM where I have two accepted proposals to speak on my autistic lived experiences. These two presentations’ scripted notes and any audience feedback will be later turned into respective chapters of the book.
Daniel Nabil Maroun, French and Italian
“Filial Failures: Writing Queer Kinship and Community in Contemporary France”
My manuscript project, Filial Failures, examines how traditional notions of filiation, the link between parent and offspring, are both articulated and contested through contemporary French literature and culture. It suggests that queer kinships can fulfill the tripartite model of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but through community instead of biology, enabling new performances of individuality and relationship that strengthen national unity through heterogeneity. This summer I hope to conduct some ethnographic work with various authors I am writing about.
Tess McNulty, English
“Content Culture: Genres of Virality in the Twenty-First Century”
Tess McNulty's book project in progress, Content Culture, provides the first overarching cultural history of viral media from a hybrid humanistic perspective. Drawing on multiple large datasets of especially highly engaged content, the book shows that five major viral genres have been especially pervasive during the fully corporatized social networking era (c. post 2010). These genres, it argues, have revised longstanding traditions of ethical discourse for the digital era. With the support of an HRI Summer Fellowship, Professor McNulty hired two research assistants to help put finishing touches on the project's datasets, which compile viral media from five major corporate platforms: Facebook, Twitter (now "X"), Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, Comparative and World Literature/Religion
“Unreason and Capital: Calcutta’s Long 19th Century"
The HRI summer fellowship enabled me to visit the British Library and the missionary archives at the School of Oriental and African Studies Library, University of London, to gather material for my next book, Unreason and Capital. The SOAS archive has an entire range of books, letters, and other handwritten documents from the London Missionary Society and several other societies. I found useful information related to Joseph Mullens, the husband of the author Hannah Catherine Mullens, who is the subject of one of my chapters. I spent more than half of my four weeks in London at the British Library and found a wealth of material on historical figures from early colonial Calcutta.
Kimberly C. Ransom, Education Policy, Organization and Leadership
“The Historic Pickensville Rosenwald School and Community Center (HPRSMC)”
The Historic Pickensville Rosenwald School Museum and Community Center was funded to conduct historical research that would inform the curation of our newest standing classroom exhibition. The classroom will foreground the voices and perspectives of African American childhoods once lived out in and around the Rosenwald Schoolhouse. This summer, the team collected data from archival collections located at University of Alabama, University of Chicago, and Tuskegee University. Additionally, our small team of faculty and graduate students held weekly reading seminars to examine historical research on African American segregated schools and histories of African American childhood in these schooling spaces. We culminated the summer with a data analysis workshop with the goal of preparing to use a critical childhood studies framework to analyze project data (i.e., oral histories, material objects, and documents) during the fall 2024 semester. In October, our team will travel to Pickensville to participate in a series of community-based research, planning and curation workshops to further design the exhibition space.
Pollyanna Rhee, Landscape Architecture
“Quality of Life: A History of a Modern Aspiration”
This summer I undertook archival research in Ireland and England on the Lucas Plan, a proposed alternative to deindustrialization, devised by workers at Lucas Aerospace, once Europe’s largest manufacturer of aircraft equipment, in the 1970s. Instead of pursuing manufacturing projects related to the defense industry, the workers aimed to use their skills and knowledge to produce “socially useful” products for the benefit of their local communities, including early sources of alternative energy for homes. In addition to manufacturing, the plan proposed a broad social vision that critiqued existing conditions of labor, automation, and economic growth in twentieth-century society.
Nisi Sturgis, Theatre
“The Verona Cycle”
My collaboration this summer sought to fuse two of Shakespeare’s plays that focus on youth, rebellion, first love, and polarization within a community into a single, long-form theatrical experience. Each part of the event would be a stand-alone two-hour production but could also be seen as a larger single-evening event. The project is called THE VERONA CYCLE. Both Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona take place in a fictionalized version of Verona, Italy, and we’ll use that location to explore the way personal betrayals and prejudices can have an impact that extends past our own time into future generations. The first part would focus primarily on The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Part Two would look at the characters from Romeo and Juliet as descendants of those in Part One, all the while exploring parallel themes like forgiveness, old wounds, and generational grief patterning.
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.