Mania Taher (Art & Design) was a 2026 HRI Summer Faculty Fellow. She spent her summer in New York conducting ethnographic fieldwork in support of a chapter in her current book manuscript, which will examine the resettlement experiences of Bangladeshi immigrant women in New York from the 1970s to the present. Describe your research. What question […]
Paige Cunningham Caldarella (Dance) was a 2026 HRI Summer Faculty Fellow. She engaged in choreographic research exploring Merce Cunningham’s seminal 1958 piece, Summerspace, as both a historical anchor and a contemporary provocation. Describe your research. What question or questions are you seeking to answer? As a choreographer, educator, and performer, my research is situated at the […]
Alisa Hardy (Communication) was a 2026 HRI Summer Faculty Fellow. During the summer she traveled to Atlanta to view Amy Sherald’s painting Breonna Taylor (2020) and spent focused time writing to develop her forthcoming work, Speculative Remembrance: Beyond Naming Breonna Taylor Across Time, Bodies and Space. Describe your research. What question or questions are you seeking […]
Amanda Daniela Cortez (Anthropology) was a 2026 HRI Summer Faculty Fellow. She spent five weeks in Cusco, Peru, to co-develop her ethnographic book manuscript, Framing Photographic Tourism: Indigeneity, Gender, and Multispecies Relating in the Peruvian Andes. It traces the lives of Quechua women and their llama, alpaca, and sheep kin as they navigate the politics of […]
Yazmín M. Crespo-Claudio (Architecture) was a 2026 HRI Summer Faculty Fellow. With the support of this fellowship, she further developed the seminar ARCH 403, “Spatial Theories from/with the Caribbean,” bringing the work of Caribbean scholars and writers into conversation with community-based and collective spatial practices. Describe the ARCH 403 seminar and what you hope students […]
Anna Mendoza (Linguistics) held a 2023 HRI Summer Faculty Fellowship, during which she worked with a school community liaison who speaks Lingala, French, and English to interview a representative sample of dual immersion parents—about 30 of the approximately 70 families. Through bottom-up thematic coding, she investigated parents’ reasons for enrolling their children in the program, […]
Eric Calderwood (Comparative and World Literature) held a 2023 HRI Summer Faculty Fellowship, during which he conducted fieldwork in Morocco and Spain for a new book project on the aesthetics and politics of multilingual art forms. Learn more about HRI’s Summer Faculty Fellowships, which provide an infusion of resources designed to jumpstart or fuel an ongoing research […]
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 […]
Magdalena Novoa E. (Department of Urban & Regional Planning) is a 2021 HRI Summer Faculty Research Fellow. Novoa used the summer fellowship to collaborate with the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos de Mulchén (Association of Relatives of Detained and Dissappeared of Mulchen) in the Region of Araucanía in southern Chile, as well as local […]