The Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has awarded its annual Summer Faculty Fellowships to nine faculty members for 2023. These fellowships are designed to help faculty maximize the summer in service of their ongoing professional development. They provide an infusion of resources to jumpstart or fuel an ongoing research project, undertake course development, or pursue a professional training opportunity over the summer months. 

HRI is also pleased to announce the 2023–24 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Public Humanities as Social Practice. This fellow will spend a one-year term in residence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, participating in the yearlong HRI Fellows Seminar and in the variety of publicly engaged humanities work ongoing at HRI and on campus. The fellow will pursue a project rooted in participatory community-based research and designed to amplify what the humanities as a social practice can and should look like, both in their field(s) and in the larger ecosystem of campus and local communities. 

Please join HRI in congratulating these new fellows! 

HRI Summer Faculty Fellows 

John Levi Barnard (Comparative and World Literature), “The Edible and the Endangered: Food, Empire, Extinction” 

Eric Calderwood (Comparative and World Literature), “Babel’s Bounty: Multilingual Arts in the Mediterranean” 

Salvatore Callesano (Spanish and Portuguese), “The Comment Section: Multimodal sentiment analyses and ‘no sabo kids’ on TikTok” 

Pilar Martínez-Quiroga (Spanish and Portuguese), “The Utopia of a Feminist Nation: The Case of Catalonia” 

Anna Mendoza (Linguistics), “Language Use and Investment in a French-English Dual Immersion School” 

Lindsay Rose Russell (English), “Sex & Lex” 

Blair Ebony Smith (Art Education and Gender and Women’s Studies), “Love a(n)d Loops: Memory, Sound, Freedom, and Black Girlhood” 

Lou Turner (Urban and Regional Planning), “The Harold (Hal ) M. Baron Digital Archival, Research, and Publication Project” 

Mirelsie Velázquez (Latina/Latino Studies), “Space, Place, and Homemaking: Black and Indigenous Oklahoma, 1865-1925” 

Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Humanities as Social Practice 

Divya Nair (Ph.D., English, University of Pennsylvania, 2021), “Classical Reception and the Problem of the Color Line in Early Modern English Literature: A Du Boisian Historiography”