Eight U-M lecturers and tenure-track faculty have received 2020 summer fellowships at the Institute for the Humanities. A cohort of eight U-M faculty members and eight graduate students will be fellows at the institute during the 2020-21 academic year.

Both cohorts will take up residence at the Institute during their respective fellowship periods, forming an intellectual community while pursuing original research and participating in regular, cross-disciplinary fellows’ seminars. Fellowship recipients represent diverse disciplines within the humanities and span several colleges and schools across the university, this year including U-M Dearborn, information, art and design, and architecture. 

The Institute for the Humanities facilitates work that examines humanities traditions broadly across space and time; deepens synergies among the humanities, the arts, and disciplines across the university; and brings the humanities to public life. Each year it provides fellowships for Michigan faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who work on scholarly and artistic projects. It also offer a wide array of public and scholarly events, including public lectures, workshops, and discussions. The Institute for the Humanities Gallery—a fully curated, vibrant exhibition space—is known for bringing to campus artists whose work directly addresses current social issues and concerns.

Since its inauguration in 1987, the institute has granted fellowships to over 350 Michigan faculty fellows, Michigan graduate student fellows, and visiting fellows. 

The fellows and the topics of their research projects are:

Summer Fellows, 2020

David Caron, professor, French
"Think Strange: Transnational Queer Cinema and the Poetics of Personhood"

George Hoffmann, professor, French
"What Westworld Tells Us about Being Human"

Paul Johnson, professor, history and Afroamerican and African studies
"Architectures of Presence"

Jane Lynch, lecturer III, Residential College
"Keeping 'Idle Hands' Busy: Ethical Subjects in the History of India’s Craft Industries"

Melanie Manos, lecturer II, art and design
"Visualizing Women's Work"

Kelly Murdoch-Kitt, assistant professor, art and design
"ORBIT: Designing Intercultural Collaborations"

Veerendra Prasad, lecturer II; film, television, and media
"Unscripted Films in Uncontrolled Environments"

Carol Tell, lecturer II, English, Sweetland Writing Program, Lloyd Hall Scholars Program
"'I’ll Eat You Up, I Love You So': Conflicting Renderings of Eating in Childhood"

Faculty Fellows, 2020-21

Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine, Norman and Jane Katz Faculty Fellow, assistant professor, English, U-M Dearborn
"Adventures in Dearborn"

Linda Gregerson, John Rich Faculty Fellow, professor, English
"'Saint Sorry', a Collection of Poems”

Bethany Hughes, Hunting Family Faculty Fellow, assistant professor, American culture
"Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity"

Matthew Lassiter, Hunting Family Faculty Fellow; professor; history, urban and regional planning
"Deadly Force: Documenting and Mapping Police Violence and Misconduct in Detroit"

Ana María León, Charles P. Brauer Faculty Fellow; assistant professor; history of art, Romance languages and literatures, architecture
"NO SMALL ACTS: Counter-Institutions in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, 1959-1983"

Janum Sethi, Steelcase Faculty Fellow, assistant professor, philosophy
"Kant on Prejudice and Communication"

Anna Watkins Fisher, Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow, assistant professor, American culture
"Resistance in an Age of Inevitability"

Jason Young, Richard and Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow, associate professor, history
"‘To Make the Slave Anew’: Art, History and the Politics of Authenticity"

Graduate Student Fellows, 2020-21

Alaa Algargoosh, Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow, architecture
"Aural Architecture as Affect: Understanding the Impact of Mosques’ Acoustics on the Worshipper’s Experience"

Caitlin Clerkin, David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow, classical art and archaeology
"Hellenistic and Early Parthian Seleucia-on-the-Tigris Revisited"

Katherine Dimmery, A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Fellow; Asian languages and cultures, anthropology
"Heartache, and the Contested Ethics of Cultural Survival in Southwest China"

John Finkelberg, Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow, history
"Becoming a Man in the Age of Fashion: Gender and Menswear in Nineteenth-Century France"

Yael Kenan, Sylvia 'Duffy' Engle Graduate Fellow, comparative literature
"States of Mourning: Nationalism and Mourning in Palestinian and Israeli Literatures After 1948"

Victoria Koski-Karell, Richard & Lillian Ives Graduate Fellow, anthropology
"Poetics of Water: Drinking-Water in the Wake of Cholera in Haiti"

Megh Marathe, Richard & Lillian Ives Graduate Fellow, information
"Understanding the Seizure in the Time of Digital Brainwaves"

Aaron Stone, James A. Winn Graduate Fellow, English
"Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life"