Full List of Incoming and Returning IRH Fellows 2024-2025

IRH Director Steven Nadler is pleased to announce the full cohort of incoming and returning IRH Fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year. Later in the summer, IRH will be sharing fellow profile biographies and project information.


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”
  • Karen Britland, Open-topic Senior Fellow, 2024-2028 (Religious Studies Program, UW–Madison) “Possession: A Story of Gods, Goods and Greed”
  • Jill Casid, Open-topic Senior Fellow, 2024-2028 (Department of Art History; Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UW–Madison) “Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene”
  • 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:

  • Ainehi Edoro (English Department; African Cultural Studies Department, UW–Madison) “Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think”
  • Darshana Sreedhar Mini (Department of Communication Arts; Center for South Asia; Center for Visual Cultures; Gender & Women’s Studies, UW–Madison) “Geographies of Migrant Media: Transregional Homemaking in India and Beyond”

Resident Fellows:

  • Margaret R. Butler (Musicology Area, Mead Witter School of Music, UW–Madison) “Operatic Women: Celebrity Culture and the Seria Stage, 1750–1790”
  • Junko Mori (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UW–Madison) “Cultural Diplomacy, Linguistic Capital, and Raciolinguistic Dynamics: The History of K-12 Japanese Language Education in Wisconsin”
  • Lindsay Palmer (School of Journalism and Mass Communication, UW–Madison) “Defending Our Colleagues: The Committee to Protect Journalists and Global Press Freedom (1981-2021)”
  • Allison Prasch (Department of Communication Arts, UW–Madison) “‘The Capital of an Extensive Empire’: The Rhetorical Construction of Washington, D.C.”
  • Lucas Richert (Social and Administrative Sciences Division, School of Pharmacy, UW–Madison) “Chain Reaction: The Rise of Big Pharmacy, Corporate Health, and American Capitalism”
  • Liina-Ly Roos (German, Nordic, and Slavic+, UW–Madison) “The Not-Quite Child: Rethinking Whiteness and Colonial Histories in Sweden through Images of Childhood”
  • Daniel Stolz (History, UW–Madison) “The Long Debt: The Ottoman Loans and Economic Governance in the Twentieth Century”

Biruté Ciplijauskaité Postdoctoral Fellow in Peninsular Spanish Literature and Culture:

  • Sherry Velasco (Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures; Gender Studies, University of Southern California) “Listening in the Age of Cervantes: Moriscas and Gendered Sounds from Spain to Algiers”

Kingdon Fellows:

  • Isaiah Ellis (Department of Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University) “Apostles of Asphalt: Race, Empire, and the Religious Politics of Infrastructure in the American South”
  • Emma Snowden (History, University of Tennessee) “Narrating Conquest and Colonization in the Medieval Western Mediterranean”

Solmsen Fellows:

  • Elizbeth Athens (Art + Art History, University of Connecticut) “Early Modern Anatomies and the Arboreal Body”
  • Daniel Davies (English, University of Houston) “Under Siege: Perpetual Warfare and Late-Medieval Literature”
  • Simeon David Ehrlich (The Institute of Archaeology, Fulbright Israel/The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) “Time of Death in the Roman Empire: Tombstones, Timekeeping, Astrology, and Afterlife among Pagans and Christians”
  • Jack Stetter (Philosophy, Loyola University, New Orleans) “Spinoza and the Philosophy of War”

Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQSC) Fellowship Resident:

  • Brandon Smith (Instructor, Department of Philosophy, McGill University), “Spinozistic Eudaimonism: The Intellectual and Physical Unity and Plurality of Happiness”

Biruté Ciplijauskaité Postdoctoral Fellows:

  • Esther Fernández (Independent Scholar) “A Drama in Transition: The Democratization of Spanish Classical Theater”
  • Viacheslav Zahorodniuk (Ph.D, Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv; Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto) “Early Childhood in the Early Modern: Locke’s Accounts on Children Perception”

UW System Fellows:

  • Thomas Leek (Department of World Languages and Literatures, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point) “Aligning Vectorized Ancient Language Corpora: Towards a Translingual Search Function”
  • Sarah Schaefer (Art History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) “Tolkien’s Art Histories”
  • Ying Wang (Art History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) “LungShar Incident of 1934–a Failed Attempt to Modernize Tibet”

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship Resident:

  • Kuhelika Ghosh (English Department, UW–Madison) “Cultivating Caribbean Voices: Multispecies Gardens, Care, and Food Justice in Anglophone Caribbean Literature”

Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow:

  • Allyson Gross (Department of Communication Arts, UW–Madison) “Of Even Vaster Promise: Material Preservation and the Rhetoric of the Future”

Biruté Ciplijauskaité Dissertation Fellow:

  • Mark John Radomski (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison) “Exploring Seville’s Cosmopolitanism: Literary Perspectives and the Guadalquivir River in the Early Modern Era”

Honorary Fellows:

  • Adrian McClure (Ph.D. Medieval Literature, Purdue University) “Haunted by Heresy: The Perlesvaus, Medieval Antisemitism, and the Trauma of the Albigensian Crusade”
  • 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”

Emeritus Fellow:

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