CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Seven faculty members and seven graduate students are recipients of Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities fellowships for the 2015-16 academic year. The fellowships support research and writing on topics chosen by the fellowship recipients.
Faculty fellows are released from one semester of teaching and receive a research allocation. Graduate student fellows receive a stipend and a tuition and fee waiver. All fellows are expected to remain on campus and participate in the research program’s yearlong interdisciplinary Fellows Seminar during the award year. The theme for the seminar and other events during the year is “Intersections” – looking at literal and figurative spaces of coming together and departing, and how ideas, cultures and identities overlap and collide.
“The scholarship produced by our faculty, graduate student and Mellon post-doctoral fellows stands among the very finest work being produced in the humanities,” said Dianne Harris, the director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. “The IPRH and the University of Illinois play such an important role in supporting the production of this outstanding research that will impact cultural production and the generation of new knowledge internationally.”
The faculty fellows, their departments and their research topics are:
Ikuko Asaka, history, “Geographies of Black Freedom: Race, Intimacy, and Empire in the Anglo-American World, 1775-1879”
Eric Calderwood, comparative and world literature, “‘The Daughter of Granada and Fez’: Al-Andalus in Spanish Colonial Morocco (1859-1956)”
Anita Chan, media and cinema studies/Institute of Communications Research, “Civic Technoscience, Digital Pedagogies, and Intersectional Research Practice Beyond Innovation Centers”
Rana Hogarth, history, “Blackness in Transit: Medicine and the Making of Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840”
Mimi Nguyen, gender and women’s studies/Asian American studies, “The Promise of Beauty”
John Randolph, history, “When I Served the Post as a Coachman: Empire and Enlightenment in Russia’s Eighteenth Century”
Maria Todorova, history, “Life in the Times of Utopia: The Lost World of Early Socialists at Europe’s Margins”
The graduate student fellows, their departments and their research topics are:
S. Moon Cassinelli, English, “‘We are Here Because You Were There’: Kinship and Loss in 20th- and 21st-Century Korean American Narratives”
Bryce Henson, Institute of Communications Research, “Beauty in the Dark: Racial Politics in Brazilian Hip-Hop”
Milos Jovanovic, history, “Bourgeois Balkans: World-building in Belgrade and Sofia (1840-1912)”
John Musser, English, “Radiant Divas: In Pursuit of the Queer Sublime”
Stephanie Rieder, sociology, “Missions of Biomedicine: Transnational Conflicts of Morality, Technology, and Care”
Zachary Sell, history, “Slavery Beyond Slavery: The American South, British Imperialism, and the Circuits of Capital, 1833-1873”
Devin Smart, history, “Exchanging Meals: Capitalist Culture, Labor Migration and Food History in Kenya since the Nineteenth Century.”
Two of the graduate fellowship recipients, Rieder and Smart, have been designated as Nicholson-IPRH Fellows for 2015-16, supported by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Nicholson Endowment Fund.
The IPRH also has awarded its 2015-17 Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities to Nili Belkind. Belkind earned a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Columbia University in 2014, and will be affiliated with the musicology division of the School of Music while at the U. of I. Her research project is “Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Cultural Production.”
In addition to conducting research, Belkind will teach two courses per year and give a public lecture on her research. This is the sixth year of the program, which is funded by a six-year $1.25 million grant awarded in 2009.
For more information about the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities fellowship program, contact Associate Director Nancy Castro at ncastro@illinois.edu or online.
