Asmaa Elsayed (Education Policy, Organization & Leadership) is a 2025–26 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her current research project, “Between Shadows and Stories: Navigating the Physical and Digital to Redefine Womanhood and Reclaim Belonging for Minoritized Women in the Global South,” examines how vulnerable and minoritized women in the global south navigate, resist, and reconstitute identity, belonging, […]
Kirsten Barker (Music) is a 2025–2026 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her current research project, “Max of the Antarctic: Stories of ‘Wilderness’ in Music and Word,” explores how English composer Peter Maxwell Davies experienced the southernmost continent as “wilderness” and encapsulated both real and imagined Antarcticas in music and personal accounts of his trip. Learn more about HRI’s […]
Ilaria Strocchia (Spanish and Portuguese) is a 2025–2026 HRI Graduate Student Fellow. Her current research project, “Flowing Histories: Examining the Role of Water in Shaping Urban Spaces and Identities Across Cultures,” investigates how bodies of water—rivers, lakes, and the sea—have historically shaped urban places in Valencia, Mexico City, and Naples while simultaneously forging their stories. […]
Serouj Aprahamian (Dance) is a 2025–2026 HRI Faculty Fellow. His current research project, “‘Showtime!’: Dancing in the New York City UnderGround,” investigates community-based hip-hop dance forms in everyday spaces, including the New York City subway, and the complex relationships between place, performance, and power. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty […]
Priyanka Zylstra (History) is a 2025–2026 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her current research project, “‘It was called Liberation’: South Asian Women’s Activism in Multi-Racial Britain, 1979–1994,” examines how South Asian women in Britain during the 1970s–80s resisted racialized and gendered state violence. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students […]
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 […]