Stanford Humanities Center
Next year’s cohort spans graduate students to senior professors, with additional undergraduate fellows and International Visitors to be appointed in the coming months.
The Stanford Humanities Center will welcome 33 new and returning fellows for the upcoming 2023–24 academic year. A mix of historians, philosophers, scholars of literature and the arts, anthropologists, and other humanists comprise this intellectual community. Through the residential fellowships they benefit from time, funding, and a collegial environment to pursue individual research and writing, while also participating in the many workshops and public events that fill the Center’s calendar.
Five of next year’s fellows come from within Stanford’s faculty: Roanne Kantor (English), Jisha Menon (Theater and Performance Studies), Karla Oeler (Art History), Bissera Pentcheva (Art History), and Ariel Stilerman (East Asian Languages and Cultures).
The highly competitive external fellowships have been awarded to faculty from the University of Chicago (Orit Bashkin and Adom Getachew), the University of Texas at Austin (Hershini Young), UCLA (Kyle Mays), UC Santa Barbara (Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky and Ya Zuo), and Western Oregon University (Jaime Marroquín) as well as independent scholar activist Rebecca Hall.
They’ll be joined by 12 Stanford PhD students, who were awarded Dissertation Prize Fellowships and Next Generation Scholar (formerly Career Launch) Fellowships. Launched in 2021 for late-stage PhDs, the Next Generation Scholar program is the Center’s first new dissertation fellowship in three decades and serves as a bridge between the end of the university's formal support and the transition to a postdoctoral fellowship.
The Center will also welcome eight Mellon postdoctoral fellows. The Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities is a three-year program for recent PhDs at the start of their careers to pursue research, while teaching courses as a lecturer in a Stanford humanities department.
“The Stanford Humanities Center isn’t a building; it’s the intellectual community of the fellows, who come together at all stages of their lives and careers, from undergraduates to senior scholars at Stanford and elsewhere,” said director Roland Greene. “One of the most gratifying aspects of this place is selecting fellows whose ideas and approaches seem likely to complement one another and then, starting in the autumn, seeing them learn from each other. We’re eager to welcome the new cohort and to see what kind of work they produce together.”
As in previous years, the Center will add to its fellowship community approximately 10 undergraduate Hume Honors Fellows writing their senior theses on humanities topics, who will be nominated in the fall, as well as six International Visitors from around the world to share their research with faculty and students during short-term residencies. Currently, the SHC is co-hosting visiting scholar Álvaro Contreras, an IIE-SRF fellow (Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund) with the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, through February 2024.
The Center’s fellowships are made possible by gifts and grants from the following individuals, foundations, and other Stanford offices: The Esther Hayfer Bloom Estate, Theodore H. and Frances K. Geballe, Mimi and Peter Haas, Jeff and Sara Small, Marta Sutton Weeks, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mericos Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the offices of the President, the Dean of Research, and the Dean of Humanities and Sciences.
APPLY FOR 2024–25: The Center will begin accepting applications for the 2024–25 academic year in August. Details about fellowships, including application instructions and eligibility, are available online.
About the Stanford Humanities Center
Established in 1980, the Stanford Humanities Center sponsors advanced research in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences by investing in experiences—fellowships, workshops, lectures, and other events—that enrich research in and across the disciplines. Through a partnership with the renowned Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), the Humanities Center embraces emerging digital methods to complement traditional kinds of analysis and interpretation. Together, the Stanford Humanities Center and CESTA serve as the hub of an international network of fellows, visiting scholars, students, and alumni. For further information, please visit shc.stanford.edu.
2023–24 Fellows and Projects
Eduardo Acosta
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History, Stanford University
A River of Ruined Capitals: History and Environmental Change in Early Modern Bengal
J. G. Amato
Next Generation Scholar
Department of History, Stanford University
Cosimo’s Church: The Politics of Religious Reform in Sixteenth-Century Florence
Ashley Attwood
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
Aristotle and his Predecessors on the Soul: the Argument of De Anima I
Orit Bashkin
External Faculty Fellow
Department of History, The University of Chicago
Historical Wonders: Jewish Jihads and Jewish Miracles in the Ottoman Empire
Caitlin Murphy Brust
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Graduate School of Education/Philosophy, Stanford University
Resisting Epistemic Injustice in U.S. Higher Education: A Feminist Reconceptualization of Liberal Education
Jeffery Chen
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of History, Stanford University
The First Pacific War: How Britain's Invasion of China Changed the World, 1837–1846
Samia Errazzouki
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History, Stanford University
The Saharan Passage: Sugar, Slavery, and Empire in the African Atlantic
Julien Fischer
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Stanford University
The Lure of Origins: Sexology and the Trans Autobiographical Mandate
Isabela Fraga
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University
Subjected to Feeling: Slavery and Personhood in Nineteenth-Century Brazil and Cuba
Adom Getachew
External Faculty Fellow
Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago
The Universal Race: Garveyism and the Practices of Pan-Africanism
Pheaross Graham
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Music, Stanford University
Visions of the Pianistic Self: Don Shirley, Rachmaninoff, and Music Performance Studies
Claire Grossman
Next Generation Scholar
Department of English, Stanford University
Uncertain Work: Wagelessness and Post-1965 Multiethnic Literary Form
Rebecca Hall
External Fellow
Independent Scholar Activist
Taking Freedom: Black Women and Emancipation 1860–1877
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky
External Faculty Fellow
Department of Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Global Hijra: Muslim Refugee Migration Since 1850
Jessica Jordan
Next Generation Scholar
Department of English, Stanford University
Anxieties of Abundance: Book and Body in America's Gilded Age
Roanne Kantor
Internal Faculty Fellow
Department of English, Stanford University
Figures of Suspicion: Anthropology, Literature, and the Voice of the Local in Global Anglophone Fiction
Irene Kuo
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of German Studies, Stanford University
Credible Witness: Seeking Authenticity in Narrative Representations of Asylum
Saad Lakhani
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
The Anti-Blasphemy Movement: Dignity, Sovereignty, and Islam in Pakistan
Jaime Marroquín
External Faculty Fellow
Department of Modern Languages, Western Oregon University
“Translatio and Doctrīna”: Natural Science and the Indies of the West
Kyle Mays
External Faculty Fellow
Department of African American Studies and American Indian Studies, UCLA
Who Will Pay Reparations on Our Souls: Landback, Reparations, and the Possibilities of Freedom
Michael Menna
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of English, Stanford University
Policies in Making: The Regulation of Shakespearean Theater
Jisha Menon
Internal Faculty Fellow
Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University
The Cultural and Legal Arts of Personhood
Bryan Norton
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of German Studies, Stanford University
Fragments of the Concrete: Ecology and Technical Media in German Romanticism
Karla Oeler
Internal Faculty Fellow
Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University
The Surface of Things: Cinema and the Devices of Interiority
Bissera Pentcheva
Internal Faculty Fellow
Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University
AudioVision in the Middle Ages: Music, Poetry, and Image
Joshua Phillips
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
At the Intersection of Temporal + Modal interpretation (Essays on Irreality)
Margarita Lila Rosa
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Archive of the Flesh: Fugitivity, Kinship, and Black Feminist Theory and Art in the Americas
Ariel Stilerman
Internal Faculty Fellow
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University
How to Know Everything: Encyclopedias, Technology, and Cultural Warfare in Early Medieval Japan
Mitch Therieau
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Program in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University
The Work of Art in the Age of Diminished Expectations
Joseph Wager
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University
Disappearance as Cultural Form: A Law and Humanities Approach from Colombia and Mexico
Chun-Yu (Jo Ann) Wang
Next Generation Scholar
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
Refining Politics: Oil Development, Environmental Activism, and Political Improvisation in Rural Malaysia
Hershini Young
External Faculty Fellow
African and African Diaspora Studies Department, The University of Texas at Austin
Receiving the Wreck: Black Sociality and the Materiality of Salvage
Ya Zuo
External Faculty Fellow
Department of History, UC Santa Barbara
A Thousand Streaks of Tears: Emotion, Identity, and Society in Medieval China (600−1400)
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