Academic Year 2024–2025
Fall 2024
Alden Sajor Marte-Wood
Assistant Professor, Department of English
- Project: Reproductive Reading: Overseas Filipina Writers in the World-Literary System
-
Reproductive Reading examines literary responses to the global dispersal of Philippine reproductive workers. More than ten million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are currently employed in one hundred countries across the world. The overwhelming majority of these migrants are socially reproductive laborers working as in-home caregivers, domestic workers, nurses, personal service providers, and teachers. Reproductive Reading argues that Philippine reproductive laborers do not just exemplify global economic transformations; they have also become the site of a specifically literary mediation. The recurrent figure of the feminized OFW, which appears in both Philippine Anglophone and Filipino American literature as early as the 1970s and continues to be an exemplary image of labor’s neoliberal flexibility, reframes received ideas about the relationship between nationalism, gender, domesticity, and the novel. Taking its cue from the Global Asias paradigm—the transformation of “Asia” through an emergent network of dynamic global exchange—Reproductive Reading attends to how diasporic Filipina feminist novelists writing from the United States have produced a transpacific literary archive of “reproductive fiction” that registers and demands new ways of reading the dislocated experiences of transnational gendered labor in an era of attenuating support for domestic social reproduction.
Spring 2025
Maya Soifer Irish
Associate Professor, Department of History
- Project: The Politics of Persecution in Medieval Spain: Toward the Anti-Jewish Riots of
1391 -
Between June 1391 and April 1392, Christians in the Iberian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon massacred and forcibly converted thousands of Jews. The first outbreak of violence happened in the southern city of Seville, where for more than a decade, Archdeacon Ferrán Martínez had been preaching antisemitic sermons. In the aftermath of the riots, Jewish life in Iberia was never the same. The conversions led to the creation of a large class of New Christians (conversos), who were suspected of engaging in crypto-Jewish activities and subsequently investigated by the Spanish Inquisition. To this day, there exists no satisfactory explanation of the causes of the 1391 pogroms. Dr. Soifer Irish's book-in-progress delves into the long-neglected records from Seville’s archives to argue that the assault on the Jews was a direct consequence of antisemitism being an intrinsic and normalized aspect of local politics. In contrast to other studies that have either focused on theoretical aspects of medieval antisemitism, or investigated local contexts in which physical violence took place, her work combines the two approaches, showing how a longue durée anti-Jewish discourse played out in local politics and set in motion the chain of events that led to the catastrophic attack of 1391.
Vice President for Research Fellowship Recipients
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
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