Scholars selected for fellowships in the humanities

Faculty and graduate students at Illinois have been awarded “Paradigms Shifts” Fellowship Awards by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH). The program also announced the first ever New Horizons Summer Research Fellowships, which will support faculty summer research and provide for the hire of an undergraduate research assistant.

“The excellence and innovation of the scholarship produced by our faculty and graduate student fellows is widely known, as is the reputation for pathbreaking scholarship in the humanities at Illinois,” said Antoinette Burton, professor of history and director of IPRH.

“I look forward to joining the work of next year’s IPRH fellows as they investigate what ‘Paradigm Shifts’ means across a range of scholarly subjects—and, by extension, how we might better understand its implications for today. Their collective efforts to push the boundaries of knowledge are a timely reminder of what an important role both IPRH and the University of Illinois play in fostering innovative, world-class research that impacts audiences in the academy and beyond it,” she said.

The IPRH Faculty Fellows for 2017–18, and the research projects they will undertake, include:

• Clara Bosak-Schroeder (classics), “Other Natures: Ecocultural Change in Ancient Greek Historiography”;
• Amanda Ciafone (media and cinema studies), “Growing Old in a Mediated Age”;
• Jenny L. Davis (anthropology), “Speaking with Two Spirits: Indigenous Language, Gender, and Sexuality in the Two Spirit Movement”;
• George Gasyna (Slavic languages and literatures and comparative and world literature), “A Time for the Province: Palimpsest and Contact in Twentieth-Century Polish Borderland Literature”;
• Lindsay Russell (English), “Women and Dictionary Making: Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography”;
• Eleonora Stoppino (French and Italian), “Ugly Beast, Talking Monkey: Contagion and Education in Medieval and Early Modern Culture”;
• David Wright (English), “That Nigger Wild, a Novel.”

The IPRH Graduate Student Fellows for 2017–18 and their projects, include:

• Marilia  Correa (history), “Unusual Suspects: Persecuted Soldiers Under Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-1985”;
• Brandon Jones (English), “Green Hopes: Ecology and Utopia in Postwar American Fiction”;
• Joshua Levy, History, “Eating Empire, Going Local: Food, Health, and Sovereignty on Pohnpei: 1898-1986”;
• Carolina Ortega (history), “De Guanajuato to Green Bay: A Generational Story of Labor, Place, and Community”;
• Zachary Riebeling (history), “After Meaning, After Trauma: The Crisis of History in Postwar German Thought, 1945–1987”;
• Michael Shetina (English), “Are They Family? : Queer Parents and Queer Pasts in Contemporary American Culture”;
• Augustus Wood, III (history), “Island of Fire in the Neoliberal City: The Black Working Class in Struggle in Atlanta, 1970–2000.”

The IPRH New Horizons Summer Faculty Research Fellows for 2017 and their projects, include:

• Jessica Greenberg (anthropology), “Ghosts in the Machine: Rights, Sovereignty and (post)Institutional Crisis in Europe”;
• Junaid Rana (Asian American studies), “The Life of Dada Amir Haider Khan”;
• Emanuel Rota (French and Italian), “Laziness: A Modern Myth."

Faculty Fellows are released from one semester of teaching, with the approval of their departments and colleges, and receive a research allocation. Graduate Student Fellows receive a stipend and a tuition and fee waiver from IPRH. All IPRH Campus Fellows are expected to remain in residence on the Illinois campus during the award year, and to participate in the Program’s yearlong interdisciplinary Fellows Seminar.

New Horizons Fellows will receive funds for new and emergent projects to support research and writing in the summer of 2017. The fellowship includes funds for an undergraduate research assistant who will have the opportunity to help develop the project and learn how humanities scholars conduct research in a variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary spaces.