Gerson Morales Pérez (Spanish and Portuguese) is a 2026–27 HRI Graduate Fellow. His current research project, “From Erasure to Memory: Cultural Representations of War, Indigeneity and Resistance in Contemporary Guatemala,” examines how contemporary cultural production (such as art, performance, and literature) critically approaches the ongoing erasure of Indigenous histories and the unresolved legacies of the […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]