Academic Year 2025–26
Lisa Lapinski
Associate Professor, Department of Art
- Project: [For People Unable to Think]
-
The proposed project is comprised of five to six new mixed-media sculptures, which will be exhibited by Kristina Kite Gallery in Los Angeles. These sculptures will be informed by research into elementary school classrooms and plant shops in Seoul, South Korea. These sculptures will be made at the Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency in the fall semester of 2025. The works will be shown by Kristina Kite in Los Angeles in 2026.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Assistant Professor, Department of English
- Project: In(ter)disciplined: Scholarly Formation in Theory and Practice
-
In(ter)disciplined: Scholarly Formation in Theory and Practice is a book project on the theory and pedagogical practice of interdisciplinarity in the humanities in US academe in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Srinivasan’s inquiry begins from the premise that interdisciplinarity is a profoundly important but also undertheorized aspiration in the critical humanities and social sciences. It is often assumed that interdisciplinarity is the achieved outcome of combining disciplines, that it enables siloed scholars to collaborate across fields, and that interdisciplinary scholars are best positioned to address lay and public audience. In fact, Srinivasan proposes, interdisciplines also have their own originary force, lay bare and contextualize the value of disciplines, and destabilize the scholarly-public divide. As many US universities establish interdisciplinary centers as complements to disciplinary departments, it is more important than ever that we understand the stakes of establishing interdisciplinary programs as institutional points of origin for teaching and research. In(ter)disciplined pursues these issues by theorizing interdisciplinarity as itinerary, form, method, and epistemology. The book will also include three innovative, non-ethnographic pedagogy-focused chapters, theorizing my own teaching and syllabus formation
Olivia Young
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History
- Project: How the Black Body Bends: Sensorial Distortions in Black Contemporary Art
-
This project positions distortion as a necessary analytic to understand how black artists are unseating the primacy of the visual realm and its enduring legacies of punishment to prioritize a study of blackness through non-visual sensory registers—such as sound, proprioception, and interoception. My manuscript fills a critical lacuna by foregrounding distortion as an overlooked concept in the fields of black studies and art history and building on a growing body of work that addresses the erasure of black artists from traditional art historical narratives.
Vice President for Research Fellowship Recipients
2025–26
Research and Promotion Fellows
Moramay López-Alonso, Associate Professor of History
Lida Oukaderova, Associate Professor of Art History
Kerry Ward, Associate Professor of History
2024–25
Research and Promotion Fellows
Sarah Ellenzweig, Associate Professor of English, "Dryden in Time: Criticism, Translation, and the Counter-Classical Imagination at the End of the Seventeenth Century"
Sophie Esch, Associate Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures and Director of Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, "Creaturely Cold War: More-Than-Human Narratives of Revolution and War in Africa and Latin America"
Gordon Hughes, Associate Professor of Art History, "Seeing Red: Murder, Monstrosity, Law (from Hogarth to Sickert)"
2023–2024
Research and Promotion Fellows
Shih-Shan Susan Huang, Associate Professor in the Department of Transnational Studies, "The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and its Neighbors"
Nicole Waligora-Davis, Alan Dugald McKillop Professor of English and Associate Chair, "The Murder Book: Race, Forensics, and the Value of Black Life"
Senior Faculty Distinguished Research Fellow
Elizabeth Brake, Professor in the Department of Philosophy, "Relationship Wrongs"
Past HRC Faculty Fellows
2024–2025
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood, Assistant Professor of English, "Reproductive Reading: Overseas Filipina Writers in the World-Literary System"
Maya Soifer Irish, Associate Professor, Department of History, "The Politics of Persecution in Medieval Spain: Toward the Anti-Jewish Riots of 1391"
2023–2024
Sophie Crawford-Brown, Assistant Professor of Art History and Director of the Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Program, "Shaping Identities on Republican Temples"
Danielle Ward-Griffin, Assistant Professor of Musicology, Shepherd School of Music, "Televising Opera: Broadcasting and Performance in Anglo-American Culture (1947–75)"
Farshid Emami, Assistant Professor of Art History, "Urban Images and Civic Selves: Single-Page Paintings and Their Publics in Early Modern Iran"
Elizabeth Petrick, Associate Professor of History and founding co-director of the Science and Technology Studies Program, "The Tablet Computer: The Idea of a Machine"
2022–2023
Niki Kasumi Clements, the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor in the Department of Religion, "True Confessions: Foucault in the Archives"
Esther Fernández, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures, "Democratizing the Classics in Spain (1975-1982)"
Alexandra Kieffer, Associate Professor of Musicology in the Shepherd School of Music, "Music and the Sacred in Secular Modernity"
Brian Ogren, the Anna Smith Fine Associate Professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of Religion, "'Reel' Kabbalah: On Cinematic Representations of Jewish Esoteric Lore"
William Suarez-Potts, Associate Professor in the Department of History, "Law, Sovereignty, and Wealth in Mexico, 1808-1863"
Harvey Yunis, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures, "Plato’s Symposium: Greek Text with Introduction, Literary and Philosophical Commentary, and History of Interpretation"
2021–2022
Natasha Bowdoin, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art
Leo Costello, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History
Sarah Ellenzweig, Associate Professor in the Department of English
Sophie Esch, Associate Professor and Program Advisor in Latin American and Latinx Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures
Charles Siewert, Robert & Kathryn Hayes Chair in Humanities, Professor, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy
2020–2021
Gordon Hughes, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History
Lacy M. Johnson, Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English
Moramay López-Alonso, Associate Professor in the Department of History
Randal L. Hall, William P. Hobby Professor of American History in the Department of History
Alida Metcalf, Harris Masterson, Jr. Professor of History in the Department of History
James Sidbury, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History, and Affiliated Faculty with the Center for African and African American Studies
Nicole A. Waligora-Davis, Associate Professor and Alan Dugald McKillop Associate Chair in the Department of English
2019–2020
Tani Barlow, George & Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities in the Department of History
Steven Crowell, Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor Emeritus of Philosophy (as of 2022)
Julie Fette, Associate Professor and Program Advisor of French Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures
Randal L. Hall, William P. Hobby Professor of American History in the Department of History
Gisela Heffes, Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures
Mark P. Jones, Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and Professor in the Department of Political Science
Kirsten Ostherr, Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English and Director of the Medical Humanities Program and the Medical Humanities Institute
Christopher Sperandio, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art
Vida Yao, former Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University and current Associate Professor of Philosophy at UCLA (as of 2023)
2018–2019
Martin Blumenthal-Barby, Professor of German Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures and Co-Director of the Cinema and Media Studies Program
Esther Fernández, Associate Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures
Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Associate Professor of English, Director of the Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Program, and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Anne C. Klein, Professor in the Department of Religion
Elora Shehabuddin, former Professor in the Department of Transnational Asian Studies and in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University and current Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies at UC Berkeley (as of 2022)
George Sher, Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy
2017–2018
Gwen Bradford, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy
Niki Kasumi Clements, the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor in the Department of Religion
Lisa Lapinski, Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Art
William Parsons, Harry and Hazel Chavanne Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion
Fay Yarbrough, William Gaines Twyman Professor in the Department of History and Associate Dean for Faculty and Graduate Programs in the School of Humanities