The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the U. of I. awarded its annual faculty and graduate student fellowships for the 2017-18 academic year to seven faculty members and seven graduate students. IPRH also announced its inaugural class of New Horizons summer research fellows for 2017. The program supports faculty summer research and pays for an undergraduate research assistant to support the project.
Faculty fellows are released from one semester of teaching, with the approval of their departments and colleges, and receive a research allocation. Graduate student fellows receive a stipend and a tuition and fee waiver from IPRH. All fellows are expected to remain in residence on the Illinois campus during the award year, and to participate in the program’s yearlong interdisciplinary Fellows Seminar. The theme this year is “Paradigm Shifts.”
“The excellence and innovation of the scholarship produced by our faculty and graduate student fellows is widely known, as is the reputation for path-breaking scholarship in the humanities at Illinois,” said IPRH Director Antoinette Burton. “I look forward to joining the work of next year’s IPRH fellows as they investigate what ‘Paradigm Shifts’” means across a range of scholarly subjects – and, by extension, how we might better understand its implications for today. Their collective efforts to push the boundaries of knowledge are a timely reminder of what an important role both IPRH and the university play in fostering innovative, world-class research that impacts audiences in the academy and beyond.”
The faculty fellows and the research projects they will undertake, are Clara Bosak-Schroeder (classics), “Other Natures: Ecocultural Change in Ancient Greek Historiography”; Amanda Ciafone (media and cinema studies), “Growing Old in a Mediated Age”; Jenny L. Davis (anthropology), “Speaking with Two Spirits: Indigenous Language, Gender and Sexuality in the Two Spirit Movement”; George Gasyna (Slavic languages and literatures and comparative and world literature), “A Time for the Province: Palimpsest and Contact in Twentieth-Century Polish Borderland Literature”; Lindsay Russell (English), “Women and Dictionary Making: Gender, Genre and English Language Lexicography”; Eleonora Stoppino (French and Italian), “Ugly Beast, Talking Monkey: Contagion and Education in Medieval and Early Modern Culture”; and David Wright (English), “That Nigger Wild, a Novel.”
The student fellows and their projects are Marilia Correa (history), “Unusual Suspects: Persecuted Soldiers Under Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-1985”; Brandon Jones (English), “Green Hopes: Ecology and Utopia in Postwar American Fiction”; Joshua Levy, history, “Eating Empire, Going Local: Food, Healt, and Sovereignty on Pohnpei: 1898-1986”; Carolina Ortega (history), “De Guanajuato to Green Bay: A Generational Story of Labor, Place and Community”; Zachary Riebeling (history), “After Meaning, After Trauma: The Crisis of History in Postwar German Thought, 1945-1987”; Michael Shetina (English), “Are They Family? : Queer Parents and Queer Pasts in Contemporary American Culture”; and Augustus Wood III (history), “Island of Fire in the Neoliberal City: The Black Working Class in Struggle in Atlanta, 1970-2000.”
New Horizons summer faculty research fellows and their projects are Jessica Greenberg (anthropology), “Ghosts in the Machine: Rights, Sovereignty and (post)Institutional Crisis in Europe”; Junaid Rana (Asian American studies), “The Life of Dada Amir Haider Khan”; and Emmanuel Rota (French and Italian), “Laziness: A Modern Myth.”
New Horizons fellows receive funds for new and emergent projects to support research and writing in summer 2017. The fellowship includes funds for an undergraduate research assistant who will help develop the project and learn how humanities scholars conduct research in a variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary spaces.
