Full List of Incoming and Returning IRH Fellows 2023-2024

IRH Director Steven Nadler is pleased to announce the full cohort of incoming and returning IRH Fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year. Later in the summer, IRH will be sharing full fellow profiles.


Senior Fellows:

  • Mercedes Alcalá Galán, Open-topic Senior Fellow 2023-2027 (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison) “Uncovering Black African Female Slavery in Early Modern Spain: Voices from the Archives and Portrayals in Art and Literature”
  • Lisa H. Cooper, Open-topic Senior Fellow 2023-2027 (English Department, UW–Madison) “The Poetics of Practicality in Late Medieval England”
  • Andrea Harris, Open-topic Senior Fellow 2023-2027 (Dance Department, UW–Madison) “The Body is an Instrument: Science, the Therapeutic Worldview, and the Beginning of Modern Dance”
  • Francine Hirsch, Open-topic Senior Fellow 2021-2025 (Department of History, UW–Madison) “Enemies, A Love Story: An Entangled History of Russia and America”
  • B. Venkat Mani, Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Senior Fellow 2021-2025 (German, Nordic, and Slavic+, UW–Madison) “No Forwarding Address: The Global Novel in the Age of Refugees”
  • Mario Ortiz-Robles, Open-topic Senior Fellow 2021-2025 (English Department, UW–Madison) “Future Anterior: How Nineteenth-Century Institutions Framed the Future of Animals”
  • Anne C. Vila, Open-topic Senior Fellow 2021-2025 (Department of French & Italian, UW–Madison) “Convulsive Enlightenment: Lives and Afterlives of the Convulsionnaires in French Culture and Theory (18th to 21st Centuries)”

Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity (REI) Fellows:

  • Emily Callaci (Department of History, UW–Madison) “Planning the African Family: Reproductive Politics in the Era of Decolonization”
  • Marla Ramírez Tahuado (Department of History; Chican@ & Latin@ Studies, UW–Madison) “Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation”
  • Walter C. Stern (Educational Policy Studies Department of History, UW–Madison) “A Legal Lynching in Louisiana: Gary Tyler and The Criminalization of Black Students during Desegregation”

Resident Fellows:

  • Brandon Bloch (Department of History, UW–Madison) “Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religion, Nation, and Democracy after Nazism”
  • Sam England (African Cultural Studies, UW–Madison) “Diwan in the Darkroom: The Literary Life of Arab Photography”
  • Sarah Ensor (English Department, UW–Madison) “Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care at Future’s End”
  • Maksim Hanukai (German, Nordic, and Slavic+, UW–Madison) “Zones of Indistinction: Cultural Biopolitics after Communism”
  • Jess Waggoner (Gender and Women’s Studies; English Department, UW–Madison) “Cripping Afro-Modernisms: Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness, 1900-1950”
  • Daniel Williford (Department of History, UW–Madison) “Concrete Futures/Concrete Failures: Technology and Crisis in Modern Morocco”

Biruté Ciplijauskaité Postdoctoral Fellowship in Peninsular Spanish Literature and Culture:

  • Esther Fernández (Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures, Rice University) “A Drama in Transition: The Democratization of Spanish Classical Theater”

Kingdon Fellows:

  • Jeremy Brown (Theology Department, University of Notre Dame) “A World of Piety is Built: The Pietism of Medieval Castilian Kabbalah”
  • Quincy Newell (Religious Studies Department, Hamilton College) “Marginal Mormons: African Americans and Native Americans in the Nineteenth-Century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”

Solmsen Fellows:

  • Chelsea Silva (Department of English, Oklahoma State University) “Bedwritten: Middle English Medicine and the Ailing Author”
  • Louis Gerdelan (Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, Science History Institute) “Catastrophic Inquiries: Making Disaster Knowledge in the British, French and Spanish Atlantic Worlds, c.1605- 1755”
  • Nancy Wicker (Department of Art and Art History, University of Mississippi) “Art Before and During the Viking Age in Scandinavia and Beyond”
  • David Williams (Classics Department, University of Chicago) “‘Addressing Clouds’: Aristophanes and the Attic Enlightenment”

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellow in Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity:

  • Barbara Galindo, ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow, 2022-2024 (Ph.D., Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Los Angeles) “Orphan Lives, Tortured Cities, and Ecosocial Human Rights: Cultural Representations of Mining Terror in the Andes”

Biruté Ciplijauskaité Postdoctoral Fellowship

  • Viacheslav Zahorodniuk (Department of Philosophy University of Toronto) “Early Childhood in the Early modern: Locke’s Accounts on Children Perception”

UW System Fellows:

  • Joel Berkowitz (English, UW–Milwaukee) “In These Days of Job: Yiddish Drama After the Holocaust”
  • Miren Boehm (Philosophy, UW–Milwaukee) “Empiricism and Intelligibility in Hume’s Philosophy”
  • Caroline Seymour-Jorn (Global Studies UW–Milwaukee) “Arab Literary Selves in the Global Arena”
  • Rebecca Shumway (History, UW–Milwaukee) “West African Roots of Pan-Africanism”

Dissertation Fellows:

  • Ayodeji Adegbite, Coleman Dissertation Fellow (Department of History, UW–Madison) “Decolonizing Global Health: African Medical Practitioners in the Environment, Politics and Science of Disease Control in Nigeria”
  • Tolulope Akinwole, Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (English Department, UW–Madison) “Vehicular Articulations: Public Buses, Cityness, and Cultural Aesthetics in Postcolonial Africa”
  • Ruth Llana Fernandez, Ciplijauskaité Dissertation Fellow (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison) “Radical Alterities and Nonhuman Textualities: Critical Forms of Life in the Luso-Hispanic Literature”

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellow Resident:

  • Amanda Mingail Shubert (English, UW–Madison) “Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture”

Honorary Fellows:

  • Adrian McClure (Ph.D. Medieval Literature, Purdue University) “Haunted by Heresy: The Perlesvaus, Medieval Antisemitism, and the Trauma of the Albigensian Crusade”
  • Matthew L. Murray (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Mississippi) “Lower Bavaria Landscape Project”
  • Simon P. Newman (History, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Emeritus) “Freedom-Seekers 1776”
  • Barbara Obrist (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Université Paris Diderot) “La cosmologie médiévale. Textes et images II: le XIIe siècle”
  • Justine Walden (Department of History, UW–Madison)  “What Price Souls: Enslavement, Evangelism, and Profit in the Early Modern Atlantic” and “Naming Race in the Renaissance”
  • Chris Yogerst (Arts & Humanities,UW-Milwaukee) The Cantankerous Cagneys”

Madison Area Technical College (MATC)/Madison College Fellow:

  • Matthew Sargent (Department of Sociology, Madison College), “Exploring Contemplative Pedagogies for Higher Education”

Emeritus Fellow:

  • Max Harris (Independent Scholar), “Battling Demons: The Temptation of Antony in Art, Theater, Fiction, Film, and Fiestas”