Spring 2025 Awards
Repair – Theme-Related Projects
Project: Transformer
PI: Natasha Bowdoin (Art)
Dates: Fall 2025
Project description: Transformer asks the question - What resources do we have, as humanities faculty, to share with each other in building solidarity in overwhelmingly disastrous and disorienting times. How do we work and respond as artists, professors, mentors, and collaborators in the age of Donald Trump? How might we channel our anxiety and fear into collective action? What kinds of knowledge and dialogue are critical to cultivate in this moment, amongst ourselves and most importantly in our thinking with students? Transformer, proposes soliciting and coalescing ideas, suggestions, resources and recommendations from our intellectual community of humanities faculty into a shared publication of resistance. Printing and distributing an edition of 200 zines in the Rice community, this project seeks to inspire dialogue, encourage relationships, build resilience and argue for dignity and expansiveness in facing the present moment.
Project: Seeming to Mean: The Art and Poetry of Asemic Writing
PI: Ella Rosenblatt (Art)
Dates: Fall 2025
Project description: What does it mean to seem to mean, and what lies beyond the surface impression of meaning? Asemic writing is writing that is meaningless, yet still appears to be writing. It seems to mean, and thus negotiates, challenges, and forces a confrontation with the ineffable. Participants will both write multiple forms of asemic writing and learn about the practice as a mode of interrogating meaning-making and confrontations with the unknown.
Session 1: Sound and Speech
The first session will be focused on translation and how language and scripts communicate. Participants will be prompted to write in a script only they can read, then translating it in and out of legibility in English (or another language/script they know). They will transcribe birdsong, notate a conversation with a stone, and lastly, create a hybrid writing system between their own and that of another participant.
Session 2: Gesture and the Body
For the second session, participants will use various forms of body gestures to write. This includes finger painting, writing asemic letterforms with their entire bodies on large paper, and using thin, india ink to make large letter marks with arm movements and extensions of the arm like found sticks.
Non-Thematic Supported Projects
Project: Texas-based scholars of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (TREEES)
PI: Nana Osei-Opare (History)
Dates: September 27, 2025
Project description: The day-long event is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople from around the state to congregate to share their current research and to meet people studying Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies.
Project: “Worlds of Unfreedom: West Central Africa in the Era of Global Abolition”
PI: Gabriel Seghetto (History)
Dates: October 3, 2025
Project description: Ferreira’s lecture will discuss the themes of his new book, Worlds of Unfreedom. In Worlds of Unfreedom, Roquinaldo Ferreira recasts West Central Africa as a key battleground in the struggle to abolish the transatlantic slave trade between the 1830s. Worlds of Unfreedom bridges a crucial gap by connecting Atlantic and Indian Ocean histories, revealing how abolitionist measures often camouflaged new forms of labor exploitation and forced migration under emerging colonial regimes.
Project: Technological Futures: Dialogues Across Disciplines
PIs: Chi Yiran (Art History) and Tara Oluwafemi (Art History)
Dates: September 2025 and February 2026
Project description: How do marginalized communities imagine radical futures beyond Western-dominated political or technological paradigms? How does the unequal distribution of digital technology across our socio-political world inform our horizon of futures, history, memory, habit, and personhood? Invited speakers will engage in conversations about the multi-faceted impact of digital technology on visual culture, across disciplines ranging from art and architecture to aerospace engineering and science and technology studies.
Project: Classics on the Edge: New Directions in Late Antique Literature
PI: Scott McGill (MCLC)
Dates: April 2026
Project description: What is Greco-Roman late antiquity? To further the study of late antique literature, Joe Pucci at Brown University and I created the International Society for Late Antique Literary Studies (ISLALS) in 2011. In 2026, ISLALS will celebrate the 15th anniversary of its inaugural meeting by returning to Rice and to Brown for bi-coastal conferences devoted to new directions in late antique literature. Each conference will consist of two days of panels, with roughly 15 speakers.
Fall 2024 Awards
Repair – Theme-Related Projects
Project: Ethnoracial Reparations, Public History, and Memory-Making in Colombia
PIs: Laura Correa Ochoa (History)
Dates: March 6-8, 2025
Project description: An on-campus workshop about symbolic reparations with scholars, memory workers and activist representatives from ethnic organizations from Colombia. The workshop aims to create a space to discuss the state of implementation of symbolic reparations in the country and propose creative public history and artistic interventions.
Project: SPILL
PIs: Weston Twardowski (HRC/ Environmental Studies) and Leigh Fondakowski
Dates: April 11-12, 2025
Registration: https://moody.rice.edu/events/spill
Project description: On the 15th anniversary of one of the largest environmental disasters in history, the Moody Center for the Arts presents the Houston premiere of SPILL, a documentary play about the tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon explosion as told by the Gulf Coast residents who lived through it. Written by the award-winning playwright Leigh Fondakowski (The Laramie Project, I Think I Like Girls), SPILL vividly stages the events leading up to the disaster and the long personal and environmental consequences of its aftermath across the Gulf Coast.
Project: concrete stories
PIs: Sindhu Thirumalaisamy (Art)
Tentative Date: Spring 2025
Project description: Concrete is the second most abundant material in the world next only to water. Unlike water, it is a quintessential “man-made material” that has come to represent human intervention into the environment. Concrete is set in our lives and there’s hardly a reason for most people to notice it—until it is in need of repair. Vernacular forms of concrete that use shells as an aggregate (such as Tabby, coquina, and other forms of shell-crete) have a distinctly biogenic quality to them—they trouble the conceptual lines between nature and culture, ancient and modern, living and inert. They also carry history and memory—violent histories of settlement and extraction, but also the memories and building knowledges of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant people. By exploring this material in its complexity, I aim to disaggregate the longer extractive histories of labor and material dispossession that constitute it. This is a form of epistemic and historical repair—an intervention into the way that settler infrastructure continues to be naturalized. The CES panel discussion will take place at Rice and draw on an interdisciplinary audience from across the university. Aurora Picture Show is the premiere venue for the exhibition of experimental film and moving image art in Houston.
Project: 2025 Meeting of the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium at Rice
PIs: W. Caleb McDaniel (History)
Tentative Date: October 2025
Website: https://slavery.virginia.edu/universities-studying-slavery/
Project description: Universities Studying Slavery (USS) is a consortium of over one hundred institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Scotland, Ireland, and England. These schools are focused on sharing best practices and guiding principles as they engage in truth-telling educational projects focused on human bondage and the legacies of racism in their histories. Critical to the scholarly work of the consortium has been its annual conference, which brings together researchers, students, and community members from across the nation and the world to share findings, compare contexts, and connect with off-campus communities.
Non-Thematic Supported Projects
Project: “Haiti and the World: Global Encounters of the Past, Present, and Future”
PIs: Jacqueline Couti (MCLC) and Linsey Sainte-Claire (MCLC)
Dates: February 7-8, 2025
Rice calendar: https://events.rice.edu/event/395657-haiti-and-the-world-global-encounters-of-the-past
Project description: This symposium will delve into Haiti’s history, current challenges, and future prospects, addressing themes such as historical context, socio-political and economic issues, and ecological concerns. Over two days, participants will engage in dynamic panel discussions, roundtables, and presentations featuring scholars, artists, and community leaders from Houston and beyond.
Project: “Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola”
PI: Gabriel de Souza Miguel (PhD student in History)
Date: March 3, 2025
Project description: Mariana P. Candido’s lecture will explore the complex history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, presenting an account of Angola from the sixteenth century to the Berlin Conference. Integrating various scholarly perspectives, Candido addresses slavery, land tenure, and gender, emphasizing the interplay between land rights and the enslavement of free individuals. By focusing on the experiences of West Central Africans, particularly women, her work challenges prevailing narratives and highlights the gendered nature of property acquisition. Candido also critiques how archives often obscure African knowledge and normalize colonial conquest, advocating for a decolonized understanding of African history.
Project: “African American Literature and the Other Arts: A Symposium at Rice University”
PI: Hayley O’Malley (Art History)
Dates: March 7-8, 2025
Project description: This symposium will include a mix of scholarly panels, poetry readings, film screenings, and roundtable conversations. Presentations will consider African American literature’s relationship with a broad repertoire of arts, including photography, film, painting, sculpture, installation art, visual design, performance, collage, and music, and will, collectively, take an expansive historical approach, moving from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. The roundtable conversations will focus on interdisciplinarity, pedagogy, and the creative process and will include faculty panelists from Rice and other Houston-area institutions. The symposium will be free and open to the public, and the events promise to bring together diverse constituencies on campus—including faculty, staff, and students—and appeal to community members in Houston broadly.
Project: "The UFO and the Impossible"
PIs: Jeffrey Kripal (Religion) and William Parsons (Religion)
Dates: April 3-5, 2025
Registration: https://impossiblearchives.rice.edu/ufo-and-impossible
Project description: This conference will focus on a part of the phenomenon that is much in the media and the halls of Congress today--the UFO, now called the UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon, since many such objects are "transmedium" in nature, that is, they come out of the water or ocean). The conference will be guided by several questions: What might be the traces of the influence of UAP or NHI (Non-Human Intelligence, an acronym especially popular in the political and intelligence communities today) in the religious traditions of the past? How does this possibility change our understanding of religion – not only its past but also its present and future? What kinds of intellectual, socio-cultural and existential shifts does such knowledge ask us to make? What does the inquiry lend to new conversations between science and religion?
Project: “Activism in Illiberal Times”
PIs: Carl Caldwell (History), Ilana Gershon (Anthropology), Vivian Lu (Anthropology), and Laura Correa Ochoa (History)
Tentative Date: April 30, 2025
Project description: This workshop puts historical, legal, and anthropological scholarship on right-wing movements in conversation with those on the left in an attempt to overcome some limitations in binary thinking about political poles. We look at the practical conundrums that activists on all points of the political continuum face. Workshop participants thus will attend to how an earlier historical repertoire shapes activists’ current engagements with expertise, as well as analyze their historical imagination and practices of knowledge circulation. This offers the groundwork for exploring questions of how political knowledge is formed, how understandings of law, state, sovereignty, and personhood surface in concrete political struggles, and how ideologies of gender, class, and race animate these struggles, sometimes in remarkably similar ways.
Project: “ASAP/16: 2025 Conference for the Association of the Study of Arts of the Present”
PIs: Michael Dango (English) and Hayley O’Malley (Art History)
Dates: October 22-25, 2025
Calls: https://www.artsofthepresent.org/conferences/
Project description: This annual conference brings scholars and artists together to discuss pressing issues in contemporary arts and literature. The theme for this conference is “Worldmaking/Worldbreaking” and how art relates to, and transforms, the world from which it came and the world it imagines for the future. Each day, Rice will host panels, roundtables, seminars, and creative workshops for conference attendees, as well as plenary sessions at lunchtime and one evening reception. Other evening events will take place throughout Houston.