Fellowship

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.

20 Years of Fellows: Asha Bhandary

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 Asha Bhandary2010–11 Dissertation Research Scholar Asha Bhandary is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. She is a political philosopher and feminist ethicist whose work incorporates the human need for dependency care at the level of the foundational assumptions, premises and concepts in the liberal tradition. In her published work, which includes her monograph, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (Routledge) she advances a theory of distributive justice for caregiving arrangements that is structured by the liberal values of autonomy and transparency. It defends the importance of an abstract understanding of caregiving arrangements with her concept the “arrow of care map” as a way of tracking distributive inequalities by categories including race, gender, ethnicity, class status.


What was your fellowship project about? Would you give us an update on the project?

As the CLAS Dean’s graduate fellow at UCHI, I was working on my dissertation, which then became my first book, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (Routledge, 2020). The book was the subject of an author-meets-critics session at the 2020 Central APA, a journal symposium in the Critical Review for International Social and Political Philosophy, and several lectures at academic conferences as well as bookstores, including the internationally renowned series Live from Prairie Lights. What I developed during my fellowship year was really one of the cornerstones of the book’s argument. I established that care has to be included as one of the circumstances of justice, working within a framework of liberal political theory. I showed that care has the same or greater value than the other things that are included as circumstances of justice—protection from attack, income and wealth—thereby demonstrating that care is one of these foundational needs. In doing so, I united the existing care ethical literature, which asserts the value of care, with the literature in liberalism that establishes the idea of distributive justice as a system of fair cooperation for everyone.

This cornerstone later became an article that was published in the Journal of Philosophical Research, with a response by Jan Narveson, a well-known libertarian, and with my response to him. It was that variety of interlocutor I had in mind when I developed that argument—someone who doesn’t necessarily believe that care should be included in our accounts of what is most fundamental to society in our accounts of justice—the person who thinks that maybe care is a private concern, or that it’s properly the domain of women, or that it just occurs naturally—I was arguing against them.

I continued to develop this project, and to write the book as an assistant professor. The result, my monograph, Freedom to Care, sets forth a new form of liberalism that is an anti-oppression liberalism that incorporates care as well as the facts of group-based oppression into the justificatory structure of liberalism. This form of justification acknowledges that what theorists know is going to be informed by what real people in the world assert as valuable. But, when we’re trying to decide on the parameters for a fair system of social practices, we cannot solely rely on what people assert in our actual conversations. We also need to engage in the kind of abstract theoretical exercise that is the philosopher’s expertise, which creates the possibility of a “metalucidity” (that is Jose Medina’s term to characterize the ability to understand the norms that structure the world around us) about how our assumptions are informed by existing inequalities. To get distance from those existing inequalities, I use a version of John Rawls’ idea of the original position as a modeling device.

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

Last month, I completed a semester as a Fellow-in-Residence at a similar research institute at the University of Iowa called the Obermann Center. And my experience at the Humanities Institute at UConn definitely contributed to my interest in applying for that fellowship. At both Institutes, I found that I was in dialogue with other people who genuinely care about their scholarship—who are deeply immersed in it, and engaged in a specific academic debate but who are also interested in discussing it with people outside that debate. As a graduate fellow at UCHI, it was wonderful to be a member of that kind of community as a graduate student. I was one of, I think, two graduate students in our cohort, and then the rest of the fellows were faculty. When you’re in a position like that, you learn so much by absorbing how other people are going about their projects. In terms of how it shaped my scholarship, being part of that interdisciplinary group of scholars helped me learn to articulate my work in a language that is understandable to people who aren’t just at the interior of the debate. For philosophers, that’s really important because it helps us test whether what we’re doing matters. Being able to talk about your work in more general terms applies pressure to the ideas, because you have to think about what other people are talking about and what they value and how to translate the work that you’re doing into language that’s going to make sense to people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Of course, this is always a huge challenge for academics, because we’re working in highly specialized areas, within which we’re contributing to specialized debates. Moving back and forth between that specialized debate, where we’re making a really specific refinement in a concept, and then talking about the work more broadly is difficult. I think that being a fellow at the Humanities Institute helped me begin to gain this skill at a very early stage of my career.

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

Again, the context for this is that as a graduate student, I was very early in my career. I remember an interaction with one of the senior scholars that led me to conclude that she was totally Boss. In a conversation during her office hours, she told me that that if she had to leave her writing for household responsibilities, (maybe she had a baby, I don’t quite remember) she would wait until her writing reached a logical stopping point, and her husband just had to wait. Those insights about how female intellectuals manage micro-interactions are incredibly valuable early in one’s career.

What are you working on now (or next)?

I just published a co-edited volume called Caring for Liberalism (Routledge 2021) and I’m going to be speaking at a panel related to it at the Pacific APA in Vancouver this April. I’m also working on a response to critics for another symposium on Freedom to Care, which will be in the journal Dialogue: The Canadian Philosophical Review. This summer, I will be one of the Distinguished Visiting speakers at the NEH Summer Institute Philosophical Perspectives on Giving, Receiving, and Conceiving Care. Right now, my new writing is for an article for the journal philosophies that is connected to my next monograph,
provisionally titled Being at Home: Liberal Autonomy in an Unjust World.

In it, I’m thinking about how to conceptualize autonomy when you begin from the subject position of a woman of color. To do so, I am combining personal narratives with philosophical analysis to yield a plural account of autonomy. Self-sovereignty is one part of autonomy; that’s the "this is my domain, don’t mess with me," component. Then there’s an authenticity component: Who are you really? How can you act in a way that’s true to who you really are? In addition, I am also thinking about the way affordances in the world are informed by racialized entitlements, which also brings me into bioethics. This new project is an extension of the theory in my first monograph, where I look at caregiving arrangements and show how our caregiver arrangements are unjust and need to be rectified. The new book will establish a link between thinking from the subject position of a woman of color who asserts full claimant status, to the demands for a just society that includes justice in caregiving arrangements. Because women of color are so often the repository of needs of others, globally, women of color are not granted full claimant status in informal spaces. In interactions when women of color assert full claimant status, we are often met with various forms of resistance—anger, confusion, hostility. This experience of resistance changes how we should think about autonomy because I take seriously that women of color are autonomous.

My research overall, is an ambitious program in political philosophy that evaluates the nature of entitlements, distributive justice, freedom, and autonomy in a way that is informed by through feminist and anti-racist philosophy. In Being at Home, I continue that project by drilling down into the concept of autonomy and then also looking at the way that we're autonomous in the world as it is—in a nonideal world—where part of what everyone wants is to achieve a state of “being at home” in the world. An explication of this state of being at home is something I developed in chapter nine of Freedom to Care. It’s a state of affairs where you have access to your valued relationships and you have access to other essential goods. In the new book, I’m looking at the relationship between being at home and autonomy, which occurs against the backdrop of our society.

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?

People’s social media habits create challenges for our habits of mind—in particular, for our ability to think independently and clearly and to maintain habits of mind that allow for intensive concentration. And this is a challenge that I think about for myself, as a professor, as a mother with two children, a teenager and a seven-year-old. I strive to protect my kids’ brains for sustained concentration that is not interrupted or filled in by the thoughts of others. We do that by limiting their access to technology more substantially than most people. However, on the other side of the equation about the goods of technology in relation to knowledge, is that social media platforms have upended gatekeeping practices in ways that are really exciting. For instance, in popular culture, there is so much more diversity in the voices that we can have access to—that we can read and listen to and watch. That this transition happened as rapidly as it did was because of technology and social media.