Fellowship

Dissertation Fellowship Application Workshop

Dissertation fellowship application workshop. November 20, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Dissertation Fellowship Application Workshop

November 20, 2022, 3:30 pm

UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library.

The UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) is offering a workshop to assist graduate students in the preparation of dissertation fellowship applications in the humanities and associated disciplines. Any UConn graduate student interesting in applying to UCHI’s dissertation research fellowship is especially encouraged to attend.

Announcing the 2024–25 Humanities Institute Fellows

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) is proud to announce its incoming class of humanities fellows. We are excited to host four dissertation scholars (including the Draper Dissertation Fellow and the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow), four undergraduate fellows, eight faculty fellows (including the Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow and the Faculty Success Fellow), and three external fellows. We have fellows representing a broad swath of disciplines, including History; English; Sociology; Linguistics; Anthropology; Classics; Art & Art History; American Studies; Literatures, Culture and Languages; Drama; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Their projects take many forms including scholarly monographs, plays, and books of photography; span time frames from the ancient world to the present day; and cover topics from sign language, to enslavement, to health and disease. For more information on our fellowship program see our Become a Fellow page. Welcome fellows!


Visiting Fellows

Sara Matthiesen (History & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University)
“‘Free Abortion on Demand’ after Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States”

Jesse Olsavsky (American Studies & History, Duke Kunshan University)
“In The Tradition: The Abolitionist Tradition and the Roots of Pan-Africanism, 1830–1945”

Heather Ostman (English, SUNY Westchester Community College)
“Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace”

Undergraduate Fellows

Kathryn Andronowitz (Project advisor: Bhoomi K. Thakore)
“The Tradwife Cultural Economy: A Comparative Case Study of Self-Branded Housewife Influencers on Social Media”

Kanny Salike (Project advisor: Diane Lillo-Martin)
“The Evolution of African American English (AAE) and Black American Sign Language (BASL) in the United States”

Hailey Strom (Project advisor: Sara R. Johnson)
“The Self and the Other: Perceptions of Identity in Ancient Greece and the Achaemenid Empire”

Evan Wolfgang (Project advisor: Gary M. English)
“I Am Going to the Lordy: A Dramatic Parable about the Life and Death of Charles Julius Guiteau”

Dissertation Research Scholars

Joscha Jelitzki (Literatures, Culture, and Languages)
Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow
“The Anti-Jewish ‘Lust Libel’ and its Deconstruction by Jewish Writers in Modern Vienna”

Yusuf Mansoor (History)
Draper Dissertation Fellow
“Native Americans in Tangier: Slaveries in the Early Modern Atlantic World”

Danielle Pierratti (English)
“Unoriginal: Transvocal works from Dante’s Purgatorio

Julia Wold (English)
“Adapting Choice: Shakespeare, Video Games, and Early Modern Thought”

UConn Faculty Fellows

César Abadia-Barrero (Anthropology)
“Too Sick to Labor: Disease and Profit as the end of Capitalism”

Daniel Hershenzon (Literatures, Culture, and Languages)
“The Maghrib in Spain: Enslavement, Citizenship, and Belonging in the Early Modern Spanish Mediterranean”

Yohei Igarashi (English)
Faculty Success Fellow
“Word Count: Literary Study and Data Analysis, 1875–1965”

Hana Maruyama (History)
“Entangled Remains: Indigenous Relationalities & Caretaking in Japanese American Incarceration”

Gregory Pierrot (English)
“It Was Nation Time: Fictions of African American Revolution (Le Temps d’une nation noire: fictions révolutionnaires du Black Power)”

Janet Pritchard (Art and Art History)
“Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories”

Fumilayo Showers (Sociology)
Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow
“Learning to Leave: Health Professions Education, the Afropolitan Imaginary, and Migration Aspirations in a Migrant Sending Nation.”

Peter Zarrow (History)
“A History of the ‘Museumification’ of the Forbidden City, Beijing, from 1900 to Today”

Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application

The Faculty Success Initiative Presents, Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application, with former UCHI fellows Micki McElya, Debapriya Sarkar, and Anna Ziering. virtual panel discussion. November 2, 2:00pm.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Faculty Success Initiative presents:

Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application

with Micki McElya (History, UConn)
Debapriya Sarkar (English, UConn)
and Anna Ziering (Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Oglethorpe University)

November 2, 2023, 2:00pm
Live • Online • Registration required

Register

This panel discussion will feature advice from UCHI alums who occupy the ranks of senior faculty, mid career faculty and junior faculty in the humanities who have been successful in writing grant and fellowship proposals. Please be sure to bring along the first page of a draft of your own proposal (even in the very early stages) for workshopping and feedback.

Micki McElya is a professor of History at the University of Connecticut. She was a UCHI Faculty Fellow in 2021–2022.

Debapriya Sarkar is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She was a UCHI Faculty Fellow in 2019–2020.

Anna Ziering is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oglethorpe University. She was a UCHI Graduate Research Scholar in 2021–2022.

Announcing the 2023–24 Humanities Institute Fellows

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) is proud to announce its incoming class of humanities fellows. We are excited to host four dissertation scholars (including the Draper Dissertation Fellow and the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow), four undergraduate fellows, nine faculty fellows (including the Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow), and three external fellows. We have fellows representing a broad swath of disciplines, including History; English; Anthropology; Philosophy; Political Science; Geography; Digital Media and Design; Literatures, Culture and Languages; Journalism; Law; Africana Studies; and American Studies. Their projects take many forms including scholarly monographs, short story collections, and feature-length films; and they cover topics from women’s activism, to human rights, to Indigenous literacies. For more information on our fellowship program see our Become a Fellow page. Welcome fellows!


Visiting Fellows

Jordan Camp (American Studies, Trinity College)
“The Southern Question”

Alexander Diener (Geography, University of Kansas)
“The Middle of Somewhere: Place Attachment and the Geographies of Being”

Birgit Brander Rasmussen  (English, SUNY Binghamton)
“Signs of Resistance, Signs of Resurgence: Indigenous Literacies, New Media, and Anti-Colonial Imaginaries in Native American Literature and Culture”

Undergraduate Fellows

Breanna Bonner (Project advisor: Evelyn Simien)
“‘The Space Between Black and Liberation’: Analyzing Black Women’s Experiences of Intersectional Invisibility Within Liberation Movements”

Annabelle Bergstrom (Project advisor: Julian J. Schlöder)
“Minds Among Minds: A Pragmatist View of the Social and Spiritual Self in a Hyperconnected World”

Brent Freed (Project advisor: Elizabeth Della Zazzera)
“A Revolution Hijacked: Art and Ideology from the Atelier Populaire

Nathan Howard (Project advisor: Tracy Llanera)
“Homofascism: The Queering of Hate”

Honorable mention: Gianna Socci, “Monstrosity on Trial: Claiming Legal Personhood for Frankenstein’s Monster”

Dissertation Research Scholars

Kathryn Angelica (History)
Draper Dissertation Fellow
“An Uneasy Alliance: Cooperation and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Black and White Women’s Activism”

David Evans (History)
“Hunger for Rights: Establishing the Human Right to Food, 1930—1988”

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology)
“Political Power during the Iron Age of the Southern Levant Through the Lens of Agricultural Production”

Xu Peng (Literatures, Culture, and Languages)
Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow
“From History to the Future: Chineseness in Contemporary Cuban, Puerto Rican and Dominican Literatures and Cultures”

UConn Faculty Fellows

Zehra Arat (Political Science)
“Human Rights Norms in Turkey”

Ana María Díaz-Marcos (Literatures, Culture, and Languages)
“‘A fistful of antifascist energy’: Ernestina Gonzalez Fleischman’s Biography and Writings”

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (Literatures, Culture, and Languages & El Instituto)
“Soliarity in Translation: Aimé Césaire and His Cuban Comrades in Art”

Serkan Gorkemli (English)
“You’re Always Welcome Here, a Book of Short Stories”

Martine Granby (Journalism & Africana Studies)
Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow
“Ten Seconds of Sugar”

Oscar Guerra (Digital Media and Design)
“Documenting Mental Health in Migration”

Tracy Llanera (Philosophy)
“The Misfits of Extremism”

Richard Wilson (Law)
“United Against Hate? Punishing Bias Crimes in the United States”

Victor Zatsepine (History)
“Unsettling the Sino-Mongol-Russian Borderlands, 1911–1945”

2023–24 Humanities Research Fellowship Information Session

Humanities research fellowships for UConn undergraduates. Information Session. January 30, 2023, 2:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room

Humanities Research Fellowship Information Session

January 30, 2023, 2:30pm

Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4-209 and on Zoom. Registration is required for virtual attendees.

We are holding an information session for prospective applicants for the 2023–24 Humanities Research Fellowship—a year-long fellowship for UConn undergraduates pursuing innovative research in the humanities. In this session, we will go over the application process, offer tips and tricks for writing a compelling application, and answer questions.

For more details on the fellowship, see the call for applications. Applications are due February 24, 2023.

ACCESS NOTE

Virtual attendees will have access to automated captioning. If you require accommodations to attend, please email uchi@uconn.edu or contact us by phone at (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Call for Applications: 2023–24 Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellowships

NEW DEADLINE: Humanities research fellowships for UConn undergraduates. Apply by March 10, 2023.

The UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) are excited to once again offer year-long fellowships for undergraduate students pursuing innovative research in the humanities.

The fellowship supports a year-long research project supervised by a UConn faculty member. The project should explore big questions about human society and culture and should lead to an original contribution to your area of study. The exact parameters (length, format, etc) will be set by your faculty advisor. Depending on your major and your academic and professional plans, your project may consist of a scholarly research project or a creative product with a significant research component. At the end of the year, students will submit the final project to their faculty advisor, UCHI, and CLAS.

The project should ask questions or explore issues and ideas that feel urgent and exciting to you. We highly encourage proposals for projects that use methods, ideas, and approaches from more than one discipline.

Fellows will be welcomed as members of the Humanities Institute, a lively community of accomplished faculty and graduate student scholars conducting advanced research in the humanities. In addition to immersion in this intellectual community, the fellowship offers:

  • A $2,000 scholarship
  • A desk/work area at UCHI, located conveniently in Homer Babbidge Library for conducting research
  • Bi-weekly check-in meetings
  • A public presentation about the project at UCHI in the spring semester
  • Participation at UCHI’s events (for example, presentations by visiting scholars and artists) and special opportunities to meet with such visiting speakers
  • A field trip or cultural excursion (for example, a visit to a museum or archive) to be announced during the year
  • The opportunity to present your work at the Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium the fall following your fellowship year
  • 6 credits for the academic year, through the successful completion of one 3-credit independent study each semester with the UConn faculty member supervising your project
  • (For non-Honors students) Admission into the Honors Program through the successful completion of this program, if other Honors admissions criteria are met.

Eligibility

Fellowship applicants should be rising sophomores or rising juniors in good academic standing (that is, students who will be sophomores or juniors in Fall 2023). Rising seniors are also eligible to apply, but preference will be given to students earlier in their degrees. Please note that students who applied in previous years and did not receive a fellowship are eligible to apply again.

Fellows from all campuses are welcome. But fellows are expected to be on the Storrs campus for their bi-weekly meetings. In the event that campus is closed for public health reasons, these meetings will be held virtually and the fellowship will be conducted remotely.

The proposed project should be humanities research. Broadly speaking, the “humanities” means the study of human society and culture. Humanities majors or minors typically include but are not limited to: Africana Studies; American Studies; Anthropology; Art and Art History; Asian and Asian American Studies; English; History; Human Rights; Journalism; Latino and Latin American Studies; Philosophy; Sociology; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. If you aren’t sure if your project is humanistic, please email uchi@uconn.edu.

Fellows should check individually with the Office of Student Financial Aid Services to ensure that they are eligible to accept the scholarship.

Application

  1. A Word document with answers to the following questions:
    1. What is your project’s title?
    2. What big question(s) is your project asking, and why are those questions important to you, your community, and society? (maximum 300 words)
    3. What is your plan for the project? What work will you do to try to answer its questions? (maximum 300 words)
    4. How do you think working on this project contributes to your own goals? (maximum 200 words)
    5. Optional question: Are there additional factors in your background or life experience that would help you benefit from this opportunity? Discuss social, economic, educational, or other obstacles, as appropriate. (maximum 300 words)
  1. A writing sample of your best research and writing (for example, your best final paper).
  2. One letter of recommendation from a UConn faculty member that also includes their willingness to supervise the project over the course of an academic year. (The faculty member should email their letter directly to uchi@uconn.edu. There’s no need to wait until the letter is complete to submit the rest of your application.)
  3. An unofficial transcript.

Deadline: Friday, February 24, 2023 extended to March 10, 2023

All questions and application materials can be sent to uchi@uconn.edu.

We are hosting an information session for prospective applicants on January 30, 2023 at 2:30pm in the UCHI Conference Room on the fourth floor of Homer Babbidge Library and on Zoom. Virtual attendees must register.

Please know while we will make every effort to review submissions as soon as possible, the materials you submit may not be reviewed immediately upon receipt. Please note that all University employees are mandated reporters of child abuse or child neglect. In addition, UConn employees have responsibilities to report to the Office of Institutional Equity student disclosures of sexual assault and related interpersonal violence; any information you submit in this application is subject to UConn reporting policies. If you feel you need more immediate assistance or support, we encourage you to reach out to the Dean of Students Office and/or Student Health and Wellness- Mental Health. In addition, if you have concerns related to sexual harassment, sexual assault, intimate partner violence and/or stalking, we encourage you to review the resources and reporting options available at: https://titleix.uconn.edu

Dissertation Grant Writing Workshop

UConn Humanities Institute. Dissertation Grant writing workshop. November 7, 2022, 3:00pm. UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209). A workshop to assist graduate students in the preparation of dissertation fellowship applications in the humanities and associated disciplines.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Dissertation Grant Writing Workshop

November 7, 2022, 3:00 pm

UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library. Registration is required.

The UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) is offering a workshop to assist graduate students in the preparation of dissertation fellowship applications in the humanities and associated disciplines. Any UConn graduate student interesting in applying to UCHI’s dissertation research fellowship is especially encouraged to attend. UCHI Director, Michael Lynch (Philosophy), and Director of Academic Affairs, Alexis Boylan (Art History and Africana Studies), will lead the workshop.

Congratulations to UCHI’s 2021–2022 Graduate Research Scholars

UCHI wishes to extend congratulations to this year’s graduate research scholars—Erik Freeman, Carol Gray, Drew Johnson, and Anna Ziering. All four of the 2021–2022 graduate fellows are headed off to postdoctoral fellowships or tenure-track jobs this fall.

Erik Freeman (History) will be assistant professor of American History at Snow College in Ephraim, UT. He will be defending his dissertation, “The Mormon International: Transnational Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1830-1890,” this summmer. His committee members are Christopher Clark (advisor), Manisha Sinha, and Sylvia Schafer (Nina Dayton and Segio Luzzato are readers).

Carol Gray (Political Science) was awarded the Mary Miles Bibb Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship at Framingham State University (FSU) in Framingham, Massachusetts. The two-year fellowship, at the rank of Assistant Professor, begins in Fall 2022, and focuses on courses in American Politics and Pre-Law. The Fellowship is named for Mary Miles Bibb who was the first Black woman graduate of FSU in 1843 who went on to teach in Boston and Philadelphia. Gray will be defending her dissertation, “Law as a Site of Struggle for Human Rights,” a case study about Egypt and human rights NGOs, in June. Her committee members are Jeremy Pressman (advisor), Cyrus Zirakzadeh, Thomas Hayes (Jennifer Sterling-Folker and Bruce Rutherford are readers.)

Drew Johnson (Philosophy) will be starting a two-year research postdoc in August, associated with the ERC-funded GoodAttention project at the University of Oslo. He will be working on Subproject 1 of the Descriptive Strand of the project, on identifying natural norms for attention. Drew recently defended his dissertation, “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse.” His committee members are Dorit Bar-On (advisor), Michael Lynch, Paul Bloomfield, and William Lycan.

Anna Ziering (English) has accepted a position as assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies (affiliated with African American Studies) at Oglethorpe University. She recently defended her dissertation, “Dirty Forms: Masochism, Race, and World-Making in U.S. Literature and Culture,” and her committee members are Chris Vials (advisor), Greg Pierrot, and fellow 2021–22 UCHI fellow Micki McElya.

Please join us in congratulating Erik, Carol, Drew, and Anna!!

Welcome 2022–2023 Humanities Institute Fellows!

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) is proud to announce its incoming class of humanities fellows. This year, we are especially excited to welcome our two inaugural Undergraduate Research Fellows, who will join two visiting fellows (including our Henry Luce Foundation Future of Truth fellow), four dissertation scholars (including the Draper Dissertation Fellow and the first Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow), and seven UConn faculty fellows (including the Mellon UCHI Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow). We have fellows representing a broad swath of disciplines, including History; English; Philosophy; Political Science; Linguistics; Digital Media and Design; Literatures, Culture and Languages; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Their projects take many forms including scholarly monographs, biographies, documentary films, and novels, and cover topics from the history of early modern empires to the language of time and possibility. For more information on our fellowship program see our Become a Fellow page. Welcome fellows!

 

Undergraduate Research Fellows

Karen Lau Headshot

Karen Lau
“Kimchi Jjigae for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”
Project advisor: Jason Oliver Chang and Grace Player

Rylee Thomas headshot

Rylee Thomas
The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”
Project advisor: Ellen Litman

Honorable mentions:

Kathryn Atkinson, “Cenabis Bene: A Culinary Odyssey through Apicius
Monika Rydzewski, “Look at the Screen!: Merging Media with Gossip”

Visiting Residential Fellows

Joseph Darda headshot

Joseph Darda (Texas Christian University; English)
“The Naturals: How Sports Make Race in America”

Kareem Khalifa headshot

Kareem Khalifa (Middlebury College; Philosophy)
Future of Truth Fellow
“Segregation and Social Inquiry”

UConn Faculty Fellows

Hind Ahmed Zaki headshot

Hind Ahmed Zaki (Political Science / LCL)
“The Price of Inclusion: Feminist Politics in the Shadow of the Arab Spring”

Heather Cassano headshot

Heather Cassano (DMD)
“The Fate of Human Beings”

Cornelia Dayton headshot

Cornelia Dayton (History)
“John Peters, A Life”

Anna Mae Duane headshot

Anna Mae Duane (English)
“Like a Slave: Slavery’s Appropriation from The American Revolution to QAnon”

Sandy Grande headshot

Sandy Grande (Political Science / Native American and Indigenous Studies)
“Indigenous Elders and Aging”

Stefan Kaufmann headshot

Stefan Kaufmann (Linguistics)
“What was, what will be, and what would have been”

Ally Ladha headshot

Hassanaly Ladha (LCL)
“Solomon and the Caliphate of Man”

Elva Orozco Mendoza headshot

Elva Orozco Mendoza (Political Science and WGSS)
UCHI Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow
“The Maternal Contract”

Dissertation Research Scholars

Julia Brush headshot

Julia Brush (English)
Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow
“State/Less Aesthetics: Queer Cartographies, Transnational Terrains, and Refugee Poetics”

Yuhan Liang headshot

Yuhan Liang (Philosophy)
“Confucian Exemplarism and Moral Diversity”

Britney Murphy headshot

Britney Murphy (History)
“Outsiders Within: Volunteers in Service to America and the Boundaries of Citizenship, 1962–1971”

Shihan Zheng headshot

Shihan Zheng (History)
Draper Dissertation Fellow
“The Opium Discourse in China, 1830–1910”

20 Years of Fellows: Debapriya Sarkar

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we've checked in with former fellows to gather reflections on their fellowship years, to get an update on their fellowship projects, and to see what they are working on next. Read them all here.

headshot of Debapriya Sarkar2019–20 Faculty Fellow Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at UConn. Her research interests include early modern literature and culture, history and philosophy of science, environmental humanities, and literature and social justice. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly called “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms” (2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in several edited collections. Her current project, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science, traces how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution. She is the recipient of the Huntington’s 2021–22 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship.


What was your fellowship project about?
While at the UCHI, I was working my first book, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science. In this project, I study speculative habits of thought—such as hypothesis, conjecture, prophecy, and prediction—that were at the core of Renaissance poetics, fascinating writers from Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare to Milton and Cavendish. I call these ways of thinking “possible knowledge,” and I use them to show how poesie (a general early modern term for literature) helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the so-called Scientific Revolution.

Would you give us an update on the project?

The book is forthcoming from The University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023.

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

The fellowship year was instrumental in shaping the final contours of my argument. During my year at the UCHI, I was working through a lot of the conceptual issues that ultimately appear in the book’s introduction. Given that my book studies the relations between literature and science, and engages with the works of historians and philosophers of science, it was extremely helpful to have the chance to discuss these ideas with colleagues in those fields—these discussions helped me to address questions of methodology and audience that have become very important in the final version of the project.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

My favorite memory from the UCHI is definitely the weekly gatherings of the fellows—these events produced so many interesting, and unexpected, exchanges of ideas! I especially recall the serendipitous nature of forming connections across our diverse experiences and interests—both scholarly and beyond—as one of most rewarding and exciting things about my time there.

What are you working on now (or next)?

I am completing the final revisions for my book, and I am starting a new project on the intersections of early modern ecocriticism, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory—in this project, I ask how early modern literary and cultural artifacts can help us think about the long, entangled histories of environmental and racial justice.

Our theme for UCHI’s 20th anniversary year is “The Future of Knowledge.” What would you say are some of the challenges facing the future of knowledge? And what do you think is most exciting or promising about the future of knowledge?

One challenge facing the future of “knowledge” is to confront the significance and scope of the term itself—our understanding of what constitutes knowledge, and what methods are the most appropriate ways of knowledge-production (the so-called objective scientific method, let’s say), are inevitably shaped by our training, our positionality as scholars and students, and the resources available to us. For instance, how might questions in the history of science and environment shift if we centered the insights of Critical Indigenous Studies? I would be interested in thinking through such shifts in our own scholarly practices—to think of knowledges, rather than knowledge as a universal idea. This challenge is, perhaps paradoxically, one of the most exciting things about the topic: as an early modernist, it has been eye-opening to see how the import—and universality—of the term “Scientific Revolution” has been challenged and complicated by scholars working on women’s knowledge practices, Islamic science in the pre-modern period, etc. We thus already have models to rethink the meaning of what constitutes varied bodies of knowledge—by delving into the long, and global histories, of these questions, we can make the future of knowledge(s) as capacious as they have been in the past.