Full List of Incoming and Returning IRH Fellows 2026-2027

The outgoing IRH Director, Steven Nadler, is pleased to announce the full cohort of incoming and returning IRH fellows for the 2026-2027 academic year. This group of 36 fellows represents 14 universities, 13 departments/programs at UW–Madison, and 7 U.S. states. For the first time in many years, we will welcome dissertation fellows from 4 UW–Madison departments.

Though next year’s fellows are pursuing a fascinating array of unique projects, there are several commonalities that are sure to make for fruitful conversation. Kevin Ennis (Solmsen Fellow), and Meagan Khoury (Solmsen Fellow) are both working on projects that pertain to textiles. Ennis’s project Spindle Economics: Women, Labor, and Textile Production in Ancient Sicily analyzes the organization of textile production in Sicily during the first millennium BCE. Khoury’s project Threadworks: Anonymity and the Needle in Early Modern Italy attends to the creation of luxury threadwork—defined as silk, embroidery, and lace—in sixteenth century Italy.

Two fellows are interested in the intersection of identity and health. Judith Houck, an open-topic Resident Fellow, is writing the first book-length project to map the presence of lesbians in the anti-AIDS movement and to analyze their influence. Focusing on different subjects, Raquel Kennon, who is also an open-topic Resident Fellow, will explore how African American literature and culture can help us understand current maternal health disparities, particularly the high Black maternal mortality rates in the United States.

A final theme for the year is race and representation. Kong Pheng Pha, an REI Resident Fellow, will examine this theme through the lens of photography. His book project State-less Visions: Hmong History, Memory, Photography explores how invisibility, secrecy, and statelessness shaped Hmong representation through photography from the early 20th century to the present. And Morris Young, also an REI Resident Fellow, is reimagining commonplaces to understand how Asian/Americans generate and deploy responses to exigencies that often construct Asian/Americans in terms of their bodies, borders, and belonging.

It is sure to be a lively year of thoughtful, multi-disciplinary scholarship and community-building. To stay up-to-date with IRH news and events, subscribe to our semi-annual newsletter here.

Full fellow biographies and project information will be posted on the IRH website in late summer.

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”
  • Rob Asen, open-topic Senior Fellow, 2025–2029 (Department of Communication Arts, UW–Madison) “Schooled in Whiteness: How Anti-Woke Publics Disrupt Democratic Education”
  • 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”
  • Tom Dale, open-topic Senior Fellow, 2025–2029 (Department of Art History, UW–Madison) “Visualizing Race and Cultural Encounter in Medieval Venice”
  • Andrea Harris, open-topic Senior Fellow, 2023-2027 (Dance Department, UW–Madison) “The Body Is an Instrument: Science, Therapeutics, and the Beginning of Modern Dance”
  • Sarah Thal, open-topic Senior Fellow, 2025–2029 (History, UW–Madison) “Ways of the Samurai: Masculinity, Violence, and National Character in Turn-of-the-Century Japan”

Resident Fellows:

  • Sarah A. Carter, open-topic Resident Fellow, 2026-2027 (Center for Design and Material Culture, SOHE, UW–Madison), “Boxes of Knowledge: Objects in Systems”
  • Brigitte Fielder, open-topic Resident Fellow, 2026-2027 (College of Letters & Science, UW–Madison), “Early Black Futures: Old Technology, Hopeful Speculation, and Black Childhoods”
  • Jamie Goodrich, open-topic Resident Fellow, 2026-2027 (Department of Philosophy, UW–Madison), “Unifying the Virtues: Benevolence and Equality are Better Together”
  • Mary Hennessy, open-topic Resident Fellow, 2026-2027 (German, Nordic, and Slavic+, UW–Madison), “Vanishing Mediators: Work, Gender, and Technology in Weimar Germany”
  • Judith Houck, open-topic Resident Fellow, 2026-2027 (Department of History, UW–Madison), “‘For Our Gay Brothers and For Ourselves’: Lesbians in The Anti-AIDS Movement”
  • Raquel Kennon, open-topic Resident Fellow, 2026-2027 (English, UW–Madison), “Humane Conditions: Labor, Healing, and the Poetics of Black Maternal Health”
  • Emma Kuby, open-topic Resident Fellow, 2026-2027 (Department of History, UW–Madison), “The Outsider Turned Ambassador: American Jewish Activists in Postwar France and its Empire, 1945-1955”
  • Kong Pheng Pha, Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity (REI) Resident Fellow, 2026–2027 (Gender & Women’s Studies, UW–Madison), “State-less Visions: Hmong History, Memory, Photography”
  • Morris Young, Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity (REI) Resident Fellow, 2026–2027 (English, UW–Madison), “Bodies, Borders, Belonging: Reimagining Asian/American Commonplaces”

Birutė Ciplijauskaitė Fellow in Peninsular Spanish Literature and Culture:

  • Daniela Gutiérrez Flores (Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UC Davis), “A Century of Cooks: The Birth of Modern Cooking and the Making of the Spanish Empire”

Kingdon Fellow:

  • Victor Couto Tiribás (Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University), “Reading a Book from the Outside: Martyrdom, Poetry, and Memory in the Sephardic Diaspora (1630-1707)”

Solmsen Fellows:

  • Kevin Ennis (Loeb Classical Library Foundation, Harvard University), “Spindle Economics: Women, Labor, and Textile Production in Ancient Sicily”
  • Julie Hardwick (Department of History, UT Austin), “An Intimate History of Racial Capitalism in a French Slave Port City”
  • Meagan Khoury (Department of Art History, The Cooper Union), “Threadworks: Anonymity and the Needle in Early Modern Italy”
  • Emily Shanahan (Humanities Program, UNC Asheville) “The Person-Object Problem in Homer’s Iliad“

Birutė Ciplijauskaitė Postdoctoral Fellow:

  • Viacheslav Zahorodniuk (PhD, 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”

Universities of Wisconsin Fellows:

  • Louis Betty (Department of World Languages and Cultures, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater), “Decivilization and Its Discontents: Contemporary French Writing in The Age of Populism”
  • Derek B. Counts (Art History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), “‘The Whole of Athienou Was Here’: Oral Histories of Undocumented Digging in Colonial Cyprus”
  • Michelle Damian (Department of History, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater), “Following the Currents: Medieval Seafarers and Maritime Trade in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea”
  • Jill Stukenberg (Department of English, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point), “The Waters of Green Bay”

Birutė Ciplijauskaitė Dissertation Fellow in Peninsular Spanish Literature and Culture:

  • Roberto García Delgado (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison), “Encircling the Transition: Counter-hegemonic Narratives and No Future Discourses in Spain: 1977-2011”

Coleman Dissertation Fellow:

  • Bennett McIntosh (Department of History, UW–Madison), “Genetic Associations: A Data-Centric History of the Social Genome, 1990–Present”

Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow:

  • Sophie Cornfield (Department of History, UW–Madison), “‘We’re the Ones to Get Action’: The National Council of Jewish Women and U.S. Young-Family Policy, 1964-1996′”

Reinhold Dissertation Fellow:

  • Hakan Özlen (Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, UW–Madison), “Wounded Identities: The Pressure of the Empire and the Limits of Meaning”

Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQSC) Fellowship Resident:

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

Honorary Senior Fellow:

  • Simon P. Newman (History, University of Glasgow, Emeritus) “Freedom Seekers 1776”

Honorary Fellows:

  • Rebecca Nesvet (English and Humanities, UW-Green Bay), “Sweeney Todd: Myth, Meme, and Media”
  • Robert Olwell (Native American Indigenous Studies, UT Austin, Emeritus), “Imaginary Empire: British Adventures in Florida on the Eve of the American Revolution”

Emeritus Fellow:

  • Max Harris (Independent Scholar) “The Creative Cult of Saint Anthony: Relics, Paintings, Plays, Puppets, and Fiestas”