“Searching for the Nexus” Between Two Movements

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. […]

“Dangerous Photographs”: The Power of Images in Shaping Narratives of Appalachia

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 […]

Shining with Possibility: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Spain

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.  […]

Rethinking Migration, Displacement, Refuge, and Violence in the Global South

Alana Ackerman (Anthropology) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. In her project “Rethinking War Across Borders: Violence, Refuge, and the ‘Colombian Armed Conflict’ in Quito, Ecuador” she is researching how the violence of war is reproduced across international borders, in spaces and at times of supposed peace and refuge. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which […]

Finding Sanctuary: Approaches to Multispecies Community and Justice

August Hoffman (Anthropology) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. His current project centers on the political ecology between humans, the state, wolves, and wolfdog crosses or “hybrids” as it manifests through the contexts of the exotic pet trade, animal sanctuaries, and wildlife management agencies. August is interested in the potential for sites of sanctuary to […]

“Speaking Back to History”: Black Speculative Novels and the Afro-Gothic Tradition

Anna Sophia Flood (English) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her research project, “Slavery’s Eerie Presence: The Graphic Gothic’s Capturing of Dark Histories and Distorted Futures,” introduces the notion of the Graphic Gothic to investigate speculative graphic novels. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a […]

Collaborative, Ethical Approaches to Uncovering the History of the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program

Nathan Tanner (Education Policy, Organization & Leadership) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. His dissertation contributes to a burgeoning historiography concerned with education and schooling in the trans-Mississippi West during the 20th century and accounts for the ways education and schooling have been utilized as tools of settler colonial state-building. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship […]

A New Narrative: Research Explores Black Diasporic Contributions to Philosophy, Expanded View of Slavery’s Reach

Eddie O’Byrn (African American Studies) is a 2024–2025 HRI Faculty Fellow. His current book project Existence Precedes Enslavement reconstructs the lives of Courtney and her son Joseph Godfrey who endured and survived American chattel slavery in the Northwest Territory during the 1800s. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate […]

Spatial, Queer, and Temporal Analyses of the Borderland Experience

Miguel A. Avalos (Sociology) is a 2023–2024 HRI Graduate Fellow. Avalos’s interdisciplinary dissertation project, “Limitrophic Dwelling: Home, Temporal Sequestration, and the U.S.- Mexico Border Regime,” explores the unintended consequences of transborder commuting or the practice of frequently traveling between a Mexican and U.S. border city. Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of […]

Movie Fan Culture and the Expansion of Literary Genres in Early 20th Century Spain

Anna Torres-Cacoullos (Spanish and Portuguese) is a 2023–2024 HRI Faculty Fellow. Torres-Cacoullos’ book project, “Writing for New Literacies: Moving-Image Storytelling and Film Culture in Silver Age Spain” is a study of these experimental practices of literary-cinematographic writing, where authors converted motion pictures into a methodological tool to explore fusing literature and film. Learn more about HRI’s […]