The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has awarded its annual Faculty and Graduate Student Fellowships to seven faculty members and seven graduates students from the campus for the 2021–22 academic year. The theme for the year is “Symptoms of Crisis.”
HRI is also pleased to announce the 2021 Ragdale Residential Creative Fellowship recipient and the next cohort of Summer Faculty Research Fellowship recipients. Ragdale Fellowships offer creative practitioners a four-week summer residence at Ragdale’s non-profit, interdisciplinary artists’ community. The Summer Faculty Research Fellowships are designed to help faculty maximize the summer for research in service of their ongoing professional development. In light of the onoing COVID-19 situation, Summer 2021 Faculty Research Fellows will have an extended timeline to complete their work. Please join HRI in congratulating these new fellows!
Also stay tuned for an upcoming announcement regarding HRI's Mellon Legal Humanities and Public Humanities Fellowship recipients.
HRI Campus Fellows—Symptoms of Crisis
Faculty
John Levi Barnard (Comparative and World Literature), “The Edible and the Endangered: Food, Empire, Extinction”
Anne Burkus-Chasson (Art History), “The Oddity of Chen Hongshou: A Telling Sign of Seventeenth-Century China?”
Eleanor Courtemanche (English), “Fragile Capitalism: The Long Afterlife of Victorian Crisis”
Carolyn Fornoff (Spanish and Portuguese), “Mexican Culture in the Era of Climate Change”
Bruce Rosenstock (Religion), “Flesh of One’s Flesh: A Black Hebrew Theology of Kinship”
Sandra Ruiz (Latina/o Studies / English), “Minoritarian Pedagogy: Psychoanalytic Affections in the Space of Aesthetics”
Emily E. LB. Twarog (Labor and Employment Relations), “Hands Off: A History of Sexual Harassment Resistance in the US Service Industry, 1936–2020”
Graduate Students
Joseph Coyle (Anthropology), “Queer Pentecostal Worldmaking in an Unraveling Brazil”
Megan Gargiulo (Spanish and Portuguese), “Race, Gender, and Recogimiento: Discursive Representations of Space, Sexuality, and Productivity in Late Colonial Mexico”
Erin Grogan (English), “Cruising Dystopia: Queer Futurity and Toxic Temporalities in the Anthropocene”
LeiAnna X. Hamel (Slavic Languages and Literatures), “Undisciplined Bodies: Deviant Female Sexuality in Russian and Yiddish Literatures, 1877-1929.”
Lilah Leopold (Art History), “Countering Apocalypses Then, Now, and Tomorrow: Land Use, Resource Extraction, and Contemporary Art”
Sarah Marks Mininsohn (Dance), “Performance Nests: Choreographing Frameworks for Instability and Contamination”
Jessica Witte (English), “The Fasting Girl: A Literary, Digital, and Medical History of Anorexia from the Novel to the Clinic (1740–1900)”
HRI-Ragdale Residential Creative Fellowship, 2021
Nisi Sturgis (Theatre)
While at Ragdale, Professor Sturgis will develop a project that seeks to fuse two of Shakespeare’s plays that focus on youth, rebellion, first love, and polarization within a community into a single, long-form theatrical experience. Each part of the event will be a stand-alone two-hour production but could also be seen as a larger single-evening event. Both Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona take place in a fictionalized version of Verona, Italy. In this new work, THE VERONA PLAYS, Sturgis will use that location as a way to explore the way personal betrayals and prejudices can have an impact that extends past our own time into future generations. The first part will focus primarily on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Part Two will look at the characters from Romeo and Juliet as descendants of those in Part One, all the while exploring parallel themes like forgiveness, old wounds, and generational grief patterning.
HRI Summer Faculty Research Fellowships, 2021
Christopher Kempf (English), “All These Ithacas” and Local Color
Magdalena Novoa E. (Urban and Regional Planning), “Wounded Landscapes: Race, gender, and grassroots preservation in Wallmapu”
Andrea Stevens (English), “Racial Masquerade and the Caroline Court, 1625-1649”