The Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies has awarded eleven fellowships for 2023-24. Recipients will join faculty and graduate students from History and other departments for a series of lectures, workshops, and symposia. Learn more about the research plans of next year's cohort below.
These fellows join more than 200 others who have earned Eisenberg fellowships since the institute’s inception in 2006. The institute announces its annual fellowship program in December and issues the awards in spring. The faculty and graduate student award terms are July 1 to June 30; the postdoctoral award term is September 1 to August 31. These awards have been made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.
2023-24 Faculty Fellows
Henry M. Cowles
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan
During his fellowship, Professor Cowles will be writing a history of mental health in the United States. The project uses histories of the six evidence-based treatments for anxiety and depression used today to explore how psychiatric care has evolved over the last two centuries.
Farina Mir
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan
As an Eisenberg fellow, Professor Mir will be working on her book manuscript, "Genres of Muslim Modernity: Being Muslim in Late-Colonial India, 1858-1947," which examines Urdu-language akhlaq—religious/literary texts on ethics—and how they reveal an important history of Islam and Muslims in South Asia.
2023-24 Residency Research Fellowship
Jennifer Liu
Associate Professor, Department of History, World Languages, and Cultures, Central Michigan University
During her fellowship at Eisenberg Institute, Professor Liu will write a few chapters of her book on women’s magazines in Taiwan. Her work examines how popular magazines communicated notions of beauty and fashion by mostly targeting urban, middle-class women, contributing to the argument that by the 1990s women’s magazines had developed these new representations of women much farther—and faster—than any other media in Taiwan.
2023-24 Postdoctoral Fellowship
Alexander McConnell
PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan
As a postdoctoral fellow, Alexander McConnell will begin developing his doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript; complete revisions on an article draft for publication in Slavic Review; and draft a new article exploring different Soviet discourses and experiences of loneliness, a widespread but implicitly forbidden emotion under late socialism.
2023-24 Graduate Student Research Fellowships
Augusto Espinoza
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Michigan
During his time at the Eisenberg Institute, Augusto will continue work on his dissertation. He also plans to focus on a series of judicial cases he has collected from the archives, analyzing the experiences of various churchmen who were brought to justice in the ecclesiastical courts of Lima and Mexico City accused of the crime of usury. This research will be the focus of a forthcoming article and incorporated into his dissertation.
W. Forrest Holden
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Michigan
W. Forrest Holden plans to research themes of magic and irrationality in eighteenth-century Russian literature, including short stories, plays, poetry, and essays.
Brittany Joyce
PhD Candidate, Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History, University of Michigan
Brittany Joyce will continue work on her dissertation over the course of the fellowship. In particular, she will work on chapters about enslaved children and how they are brought into their communities through baptism and circumcision, and enslaved people dedicated to virginity and the contradictions in that status.
Pragya Kaul
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Michigan
As an Eisenberg Institute fellow, Pragya Kaul will continue drafting her dissertation on Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe in the British Empire. The chapters will foreground discussions among European colonial governments, native rulers, and refugee agencies on the activities of Jewish refugees in British India during the Second World War.
Sangita Saha
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Michigan
During the fellowship period, Sangita Saha will continue her dissertation work and draft the last chapter on Bengali women’s consumption of clothes and shoes in the colonial period by using the vernacular archive she built around her project. She will also substantially polish the earlier chapters of the dissertation.
