Mellon Humanities Fellows
2022-2023
Elizabeth Shanks Alexander
Professor, Religious Studies
Research Project: The Social Implications of Grammatical Gender in Biblical Law & Early Rabbinic Commentary (c. 300 CE)
Oludamini Ogunnaike
Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy, Religious Studies
Research Project: Dreaming Sufism in the Sokoto Caliphate: Dreams and Knowledge in African Islamic Philosophy
2020-2021
Allison Bigelow
Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish, Spanish
Research Project: “Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World”
Ari Blatt
Associate Professor, French
Research Project: “State of Place, State of Mind: Vernacular Landscapes in Contemporary French Photography”
Tessa Farmer
Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Language and Cultures, and Global Studies
Research Project: “Cairo’s Sabils: Gifting Water”
Kasey Jernigan
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, Anthropology & American Studies
Research Project: “Mapping Indigenous/UVA Relations”
Neeti Nair
Associate Professor, History
Research Project: “India’s Partition: Literature, Culture, Politics”
Michael Puri
Associate Professor, Music
Research Project: “Mimetic Musical Modernism: The Case of Maurice Ravel”
China Scherz
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Research Project: “Not Me: Addiction, Release, and Response in Central Uganda"
Joshua M. White
Associate Professor, History
Research Project: “An Epic Tale of Sorrow and Joy: Slavery, Migration, and the Mediterranean Journeys of an Ottoman Manuscript”
2019-2020
Ahmed H. al-Rahim
Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Research Project: Mobility and Knowledge in the Mongol Empire
Njelle Hamilton
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Research Project: “Caribbean Chronotropes: The Politics, Physics, and Poetics of Time in Contemporary Fiction”
Fotini Kondyli
Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology
Research Project: Citizen Participation and Urban Planning in Byzantine Athens
Erik Linstrum
Associate Professor, Department of History
Research Project: Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of Empire
Giulia Paoletti
Assistant Professor, Department of Art
Research Project: Reinventing Photography: Technology and Visuality in Senegal (1860-1960)
Katelyn Wood
Assistant Professor, Department of Drama
Research Project: Cracking Up: Black Feminist Stand-Up Comedy in 20th and 21st Century USA
2018-2019
Paul Dobryden
Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Languages
Research Project: Energetic Media: Thermodynamics and the German Avante-Garde
Matthew Hedstrom
Associate Professor, American Studies and Religious Studies
Research Project: Religion of Humanity: Spirituality, Politics and the United Nations
Aynne Kokas
Assistant Professor, Department of Media Studies
Research Project: Border Patrol on the Digital Frontier: China, US and the Global Battle for Data Security
Shankar Nair
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Research Project: Hindu-Muslim Cosmopolitan Cultures in Early Modern South Asia
Ricardo Padrón
Associate Professor, Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
Research Project: Boxer Codex: Colonial Spanish Empire in South East Asia
Jennifer Rubenstein
Associate Professor, Department of Politics
Research Project: The Politics of Emergency Claim-Making and it Alternatives
Samhita Sunya
Assistant Professor of Transnational Cinema, Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures
Research Project: South by South/West Asia: Transregional Cartographies of Cinematic Action Genres
Jarrett Zigon
William and Linda Porterfield Chair of Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology
Research Project: Moral-Political Subjectivity in the Global HIV/AIDS Pandemic
2017-2018
Nizar Hermes
Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures
Research Project: Of Cities and the Poetic Imagination in the Premodern and Precolonial Maghrib, 9th-19th Centuries AD
William Hitchcock
Professor, Corcoran Department of History
Research Project: Refugee Century: An International History
Murad Idris
Assistant Professor, Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
Research Project: The Travels of Islamic Philosophy: The Global Afterlives of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, 17th c. – 21st c.
Christopher Krentz
Associate Professor, Department of English
Research Project: Unexpected Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in the Literature of the Global South
Christina Mobley
Assistant Professor, Corcoran Department of History
Research Project: The Kongolese Atlantic: The Central African History of the Haitian Revolution
Charlotte Rogers
Assistant Professor, Spanish, Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
Research Project: Savage Storms in Literature of the Americas
2016-2017
Enrico Cesaretti
Associate Professor, Italian
Research Project: "Telling Matters: Narratives of Ecological Entanglements in Modern Italy"
Sheila Crane
Associate Professor, Architectural History, School of Architecture
Research Project: "Inventing Informality"
Douglas Fordham
Associate Professor, Art History, McIntire Department of Art
Research Project: "Aquatint Empires"
Christian McMillen
Professor, Corcoran Department of History
Research Project: "Water Development in the Global South, 1960s to the Present"
Amanda Phillips
Assistant Professor, Art History, McIntire Department of Art
Research Project: "Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean: Silk and the Commerce of Fashion in the Early Modern Period"
2015-2016
Nichole Flores
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Research Project: "Guadalupe in the Public Square: Aesthetic Solidarity and the Pursuit of Justice"
Denise Walsh
Associate Professor, Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
Research Project: "When Rights Go Wrong: Multiculturalism and Women's Rights"