Mirelsie Velázquez (Latina/Latino Studies and Education Policy, Organization & Leadership) is a 2025–2026 HRI Faculty Fellow. Her current research project, “Genealogies of Empowerment and the Makings of Home: Latina/o Activism at the University of Illinois, 1970–1992,” shows us the ways Latina/os have been instrumental in radically transforming educational spaces amidst the contentious socio-political culture of […]
Debayudh Chatterjee (English) is a 2025–2026 HRI Graduate Fellow. His dissertation, which examines progressive Indian literature and cinema from the late 1980s to 2014, raises the questions: 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 […]
Research Spotlight: Jordan Woodward Originally hailing from Oklahoma, a state with its own distinct histories tied to extractive industry, Jordan Woodward is a researcher exploring the ways in which former mining communities recognize the past while reshaping their shared identity—and the role of storytelling in those changes. As a postdoctoral research associate in public humanities […]
Stanislav Khudzik (History) is a 2025–2026 HRI Graduate Fellow. His research project, “1905 After 1917: The Bolshevik Archive, Oral Storytelling, and Historical Media in Early Soviet Leningrad, 1921-1926,” explores the efforts of the Leningrad Commission for the History of the October Revolution and the Russian Communist Party (Istpart) in the early 1920s to revisit the […]
Ryan Griffis (Art and Design) is a 2025–2026 HRI Faculty Fellow. His research project, “When the Landscape Recognizable Today Was Shaped,” is a multimedia artwork focused on wetlands in the Central Illinois River Valley, combining documentary interviews, landscape imagery, and speculative poetry and visuals. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty […]
Daniel Nabil Maroun (French and Italian) is a 2025–2026 HRI Faculty Fellow. His current research project, “The Politics of Kinship: Writing Queerness, Filiation, and Race in Contemporary France,” reexamines the story and legitimacy of family as a social construct in France, exploring how different queer populations reconstruct what constitutes a family through new forms of […]
Caitlin Clarke (Health and Kinesiology), Jesse Couture (Health and Kinesiology), and Jacob Fredericks (Recreation, Sport, and Tourism) are co-directors of the HRI 2024-25 Research Cluster “Interdisciplinary Sport Studies.” They discuss how collaboration and interdisciplinary work to help bridge the gap between faculty engaging with sport from a variety of perspectives. HRI Research Cluster funds support the efforts of […]
Chelsea Birchmier(Psychology) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her project, “‘Searching for the Nexus’ Between Two Movements: Fight for $15 and Possibilities for Black Worker Struggle in St. Louis, Missouri,” investigates how Black liberation and labor movements have both coalesced and diverged, using community psychology to understand individuals and communities functioning within local political systems. […]
Sharayah L. Cochran (Art History) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her research project examines the injurious potential of documentary photographs. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment. What is unique about your research […]
Lázaro García Angulo (Spanish and Portuguese) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. His project, “‘Yet Another Woman-Man’: Representations of Gender Nonconformity in Spain, 1880–1939,” seeks to analyze the multiple, and sometimes contradictory, narratives that developed in media around the subject of gender nonconformity, and their evolving relationship to questions of race, class, modernity, and national identity. […]