Marina Moscoso Arabía (Human Geography and GRID Interdisciplinary Minor) is a member of the 23–24 graduate cohort for “Improvise and Intervene,” the second Interseminars project funded by the Mellon Foundation. She shares about her experiences with Interseminars below. The Interseminars Initiative is gearing up for the third round of the grant in 24–25! Learn more […]
Hermann von Hesse (Art History, Art & Design) is a 2023–2024 HRI Campus Faculty Fellow. Von Hesse’s research focuses on the nexus between the material cultures of the African Atlantic world, the Black Diaspora and early modern European imperial and capitalist expansion and the contemporary legacies of these historical processes. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship […]
Blair Ebony Smith (Art Education, Gender & Women’s Studies) was a 2023 HRI Summer Faculty Fellow. Smith used the fellowship funding to support a research trip to Richmond, Virginia. Learn more about HRI’s Summer Faculty Fellowships, which are designed to help faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign maximize the summer in service of their ongoing […]
Emma Velez (Gender and Women’s Studies) is a 2022–2023 HRI Campus Faculty Fellow. Velez’s manuscript, “Orienting Historias: Unraveling the Coloniality of Gender through Las Tres Madres,” shows how the processes of colonization shifted, embodied, and emplaced orientations to social life through the imposition of the categorial logics of race, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about HRI’s […]
Research Focused on Movement of Ideas Across Cultures Eva Kuras (Comparative and World Literature), the 2022–23 Mellon Pre-Doctoral Public Humanities Fellow, writes about her fellowship project, what drew her to this work, and what “public humanities” means to her. What motivated you to apply for the Mellon Pre-Doctoral Public Humanities Fellowship? I have always been […]
Deena Rymhs (American Indian Studies) is a 2022–2023 HRI Campus Faculty Fellow. Rymhs’ project “Putting Back Together: Re-Worldings in annie ross’s Pots and Other Living Beings” focuses on a recently published book of poet and weaver annie ross (Maya). Composed of diptych photographs stitched together in a poetic travelogue through nuclear-infused (Indigenous) lands, Pots and Other Living […]
Amanda Smith (French and Italian) is a 2022–2023 HRI Campus Graduate Student Fellow. Smith’s research project, “21st Century Black Beauty Resistance: Collectivism, Individuality, and In/Visibility in Black French Women’s Body and Hair Representations,” examines representations of Black women’s bodies and hair in Francophone autobiographical, sociocultural, and literary texts written by 21st century Black women to […]
Lingyan Liu (History) is a 2022–2023 HRI Campus Graduate Student Fellow. Liu’s research project, “That Hideous Sound: The Speaking, Singing, and Shouting of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Race Making, 1850s-1930s,” explores how the sounds of Chinese opera, street hawkers, labors, festival firecrackers were historically constructed as unnatural and noisy, leading to the sonic configuration […]
Damian Vergara Bracamontes (Gender and Women’s Studies) is a 2022–2023 HRI Campus Faculty Fellow. Vergara Bracamontes’ forthcoming book, The Administration of Illegality and Mexican Migrant Life, traces the formation and consolidation of illegality in a new phase of social exclusion and control in San Diego, California in the 1970s. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which […]
Dilara Çalişkan (Anthropology) is a 2022–2023 HRI Campus Graduate Student Fellow. Çalişkan’s research, “World and Kin Making: Family, Time and Memory among Trans Mothers and Daughters in Turkey” is an ethnographic exploration of how trans women who do sex work in Istanbul creatively compose spaces of relatedness through mother and daughter relationships to challenge social […]