The Institute for the Humanities has awarded fellowships to eight U-M lecturers and tenure-track faculty in the second year of our eight-week summer fellowship program. Nine U-M faculty members and nine graduate students have received fellowships to support research projects they will pursue during the 2019-20 academic year 2019-20.

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, public policy, music, art and design, and medicine.

Established in 1987, the Institute for the Humanities serves as a nationally and internationally recognized center for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts at the University of Michigan. The institute also offers a lively program of lectures, panel discussions, art exhibitions and more to the university community and to the public.

The fellows and the topics of their research projects are:

Summer Fellows, 2019

Philip Christman, lecturer II, English
"The Writing Process"

Henry Cowles, assistant professor, history
"The Scientific Method: Evolution and Experiment from Darwin to Dewey"

Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas, professor, Spanish
"Vital Signs: Midwifing Fiction in Spain, 1540-1690"

Annette Joseph-Gabriel, assistant professor, French
"Fashioning the Citizen: Enslaved Children’s Textual Production in the Atlantic World”

Shelley Manis, lecturer IV, Sweetland Writing Center and comprehensive studies
"Beyond Metaphor: Performance and Writing"

Christine Modey, lecturer III, Sweetland Writing Center
"Ethnographic Study of the Sermon Preparation Processes of Clergy"

David Morse, lecturer IV, public policy
"The Occident, a Novel-in-progress"

Antoine Traisnel, assistant professor, comparative literature and English
"Martha: A Life in Captivity"

Faculty Fellows, 2019-20

Charlotte Albrecht, Richard and Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow, assistant professor, American culture and women’s studies
"An Inconsistent History: Arab American Peddlers and the Making of Sexuality, Gender, and Race"

Marlyse Baptista, John Rich Faculty Fellow, professor, Afroamerican and African studies and linguistics
"E pluribus unum: Out of many voices, one language"

Sarah Ensor, Steelcase Faculty Fellow, assistant professor, environment and English language and literature
"Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity"

Heidi Kumao, Hunting Family Faculty Fellow, professor, art and design
"Real and Imagined: Animating the Spaces Between Us"

Petra Kuppers, Hunting Family Faculty Fellow, professor, English language and literature, women’s studies, art and design, and theater and drama
"Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Experiments"

Ashley Lucas, Richard and Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow, associate professor, theater and drama, English, Residential College, and art and design
"Prison Theatre: Performance and Incarceration"

Diana Yi-Man Ng, Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow, associate professor of art history
"Roman Public Visual Culture and the Cognition of Identity and Commemoration"

Tiffany Ng, Richard and Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow, assistant professor of music
"Inequality in Public Soundscapes: The Carillon, Organ, and the Politics of Public Space in the Twentieth Century"

Scott Stonington, Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow, assistant professor, anthropology and clinical lecturer, internal medicine
"Expanding Ethics to Account for Complex Personhood"

Postdoctoral Fellow, 2019-20

Alena Aniskiewicz, post-doctoral fellow, Slavic languages and literatures
"Cultural Remix: Polish Hip Hop and the Sampling of Heritage"

Graduate Student Fellows, 2019-20

Sahin Acikgoz, Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow, comparative literature
“Transgender in Translation: A Transnational Category of Socio-Cultural Analysis in the Turkish Nation-State”

Joel Batterman, Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow, urban and regional planning
"A Metropolitan Dilemma: Race, Power and Regional Planning in Detroit"

Megan Behrend, Sylvia 'Duffy' Engle Graduate Fellow, English language and literature
“The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization”

Nicholas Caverly, David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow, anthropology
"Restructured City: Demolition and Racial Accumulation in Detroit"

Kyle Frisina, David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow, American culture and English language and literature
“Thinking Theatrically: Contemporary Aesthetics for Ethical Citizenship”

Zehra Hashmi, A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Fellow, anthropology and history
"Biometric Belonging: Datafied Kinship and Databased Governance in Urban Pakistan"

Shira Schwartz, Richard & Lillian Ives Graduate Fellow, comparative literature
"Yeshiva Quirls: A Textual Ethnography of Jewish Gender, Sex and Reproduction"

Elizabeth Tacke, James A. Winn Graduate Fellow, English and education
"Rhetorics of Masking: Negotiating Disclosures of Disability and Trauma"