Announcing UCHRI Grant Recipients for
2024-25

UCHRI is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2024-25 grants, which support a wide range of collaborative and individual faculty and graduate student research projects. This year, we are especially excited for the new California histories projects we funded in the Engaging Humanities category, the reparative work underway in Multicampus Faculty Working Groups, and graduate student Climate Action research.

Multicampus Faculty Working Groups

Reparative Memories: Communities in Crisis and Archival Care
Crystal Baik, Gender and Sexuality Studies, UC Riverside and Thuy Vo Dang, Department of Information Studies, UC Los Angeles

Repair in Times of Reaction: Reparative Humanities Practices for Antiracist Medical Education
Carlos Martinez, Latin American and Latino Studies, UC Santa Cruz and Aimee Medeiros, Humanities and Social Sciences, UC San Francisco

Fostering Collective Care and Repair: Critical Central American Studies Research and Pedagogical Praxis as Resistance
Giovanni Batz, Chicana and Chicano Studies, UC Santa Barbara and José Ignacio Carvajal, Literature, UC San Diego

Latinx Stories of Care and Repair: Community-Engaged Bilingual Narrative Medicine
Rocío Pichon-Rivière, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Irvine

Engaging Humanities

Colorado Desert Education Collaborative
Matthew Herbst, Making of the Modern World Program, UC San Diego

Black Trans Ethical Worldmaking Lab
Elyse Ambrose, Department for the Study of Religion and Department of Black Study, UC Riverside

Uncovering Diverse Histories of Yolo County
Cecilia Tsu, History, UC Davis

Agri-Cultural Justice from California’s Central Valley to the Mississippi Delta
Erica Kohl-Arenas, American Studies, UC Davis

Before You Are Here: Rematriating the Map for Indigenous History, Culture, and Storytelling
Clancy Wilmott, Geography and Berkeley Center for New Media, UC Berkeley

The Tribunal Project
Angela Marino, Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance, UC Berkeley

Climate Action Training and Summer Dissertation Fellowship

Embera Embodied Knowledge: An Eco-Cultural Archive for Stingless Honeybee Conservation, Kinship Revitalization, and Land-Stewardship
Alejandra Cano, Native American Studies, UC Davis

Acting Edible: The Taste of Performance on a Damaged Planet
Elizabeth McQueen, Theater and Performance Studies, UC Los Angeles

Ocean Gyres and Historic Currents: Interpreting an Expanding World through Romance in Early Modern England
Mikhalia Redovian, English, UC Davis

The (il)legibility of the Black experience in Mexico: Citizenship, Antiblackness, and Ecological Authority
Grecia Perez, Anthropology, UC Riverside

Toward an Ecocritical History of Contemporary Ocean Art and Science Since 1970
Joe Riley, Visual Arts, UC San Diego

At the Ends of Media: Media Pollution, Secondhand Extraction, and Environmental Politics in Guiyu, China
Tinghao Zhou, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Prayer in the Pluriverse: Resisting Extractivism Across Worlds
Elane Westfaul, Political Science, UC Irvine

Mapping Imperial Japan’s Greatest Calamities: Learning Nation and Enacting Empire Through Disaster
Clara Bergamini, History, UC Santa Cruz

UC Underrepresented Scholars 

Mentees
Kathleen Cruz, Classics, UC Davis
Christofer Rodelo, Chicano/Latino Studies, UC Irvine
Justin Perez, Latin American and Latino Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Bright Gyamfi, History, UC San Diego
Nohora Arrieta Fernández, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Los Angeles
Génesis Lara, Chicano/Latino Studies, UC Irvine
Silpa Mukherjee, Literature, UC San Diego
Mercedes Trigos, English, UC Irvine
Amanda Joyce Hall, History, UC Santa Barbara
Brenda Nicolas, Global and International Studies, UC Irvine
Michael Moses, Education, UC Riverside
Yehuda Sharim, Global Arts Studies Program, UC Merced
Kristina Lovato, Social Welfare, UC Berkeley
Mahaliah Little, Gender and Sexuality Studies, UC Irvine
Ava Kim, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, UC Davis

Mentors
Juana María Rodríguez, Ethnic Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, UC Berkeley
Gaye Theresa Johnson, Chicana/o Studies, UC Los Angeles
Miroslava Chavez-García, History, UC Santa Barbara
Marissa López, English and Chicana/o Studies, UC Los Angeles
Cecilia Ayón, Public Policy, UC Riverside
Vernadette Gonzalez, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Daylet Dominguez, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Berkeley
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, Theater, Film, and TV, UC Los Angeles
Robin Derby, History, UC Los Angeles
Gina Garcia, Education, UC Berkeley
María del Rosario Acosta López, Hispanic Studies, UC Riverside
Anjali Arondekar, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Cori Hayden, Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Marc Anthony Matera, History, UC Santa Cruz
Christoph Hanssman, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, UC Davis

Multicampus Graduate Student Working Groups

Embodying Care: Practicing Pleasure-Based Scholarship
Lena Chen, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

CARE: Collective for Archival Research of Embodiment
Yiming Ma, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Anticolonial Marxism Working Group
Sara Hussein, History, UC Los Angeles

Faculty Summer Research Funding

Divine Eloquence in Penitential Songs from Franciscan Missions to Andalusian Holy Week
Cesar Favila, Musicology, UC Los Angeles

Burial and Mobility in Classical Athens: An Archaeological Approach
Camille Acosta, Art History, UC Irvine

All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance
Hannah Zaevin, History, UC Berkeley

Cooking as Care: Labor, Nourishment, and Religion in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic
Daniela Gutierrez Flores, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Davis

Black Miami in the Eye of the Storm: Performing Black Sustainability
Mysia Anderson, Theater and Dance, UC San Diego

Conference Grants

Reimagining the Archive: Eaton Speculative Fiction Conference
André Carrington, English, UC Riverside

Media and Migration
Minoo Moallem, Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Intimacies of Relation: The Autotheoretical Turn
Vilashini Cooppan, Literature and Critical Race Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Graduate Dissertation Awards

Imperial Tides in Afro-Indigenous Rivers: Cultivating Place, Race, and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Amazon (1755-1850)
Manoel Domingos Farias Rendeiro Neto, History, UC Davis

Collie Crossings: Transnational Labor Migration and Modern Chinese Literature, 1900-1947
Tianyun Hua, Comparative Literature, UC Davis

Palimpsexts and Body Doubles: Autotheory in the Films of Agnès Varda, Albertina Carri, Laetitia Masson, and Lina Rodriguez
Iliana Cuellar, Comparative Literature, UC Riverside

A Tale of Two Cloud Polis – Neoliberalism, Postsocialism, and the Cultural Politics of Technology
Qiaoyu Cai, English, UC Santa Barbara

“Small Officiousnesses:” Minorness and Intimacy in Early Modern English Literature
Arya Sureshbabu, English, UC Berkeley

Reimagining Care: Health, Aging, and Neoliberal Governance in the Philippines
Edward Nadurata, Global and International Studies, UC Irvine

Orchestrating Egypt: Cultural Politics and the Adoption of New Musical Instruments in Arab Music
Kira Weiss, Music, UC Santa Barbara

Amulets and Society in Late Antique Oxyrhynchus
Evan Andersson, History, UC Santa Barbara

Dissident Communism: Trajectories of the Independent Left in Postcolonial Syria
Robin Jones, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz

Pianos in Amerika: Franz Kafka, Alfred Dolge, and the Instruments of Acculturation
Jake Wilder-Smith, Comparative Literature, UC Los Angeles

Medicine & Humanities: The Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White Graduate Student Scholarship

Late Byzantine Medicine in the Face of Black Death: A Study of Intellectual History and Medical Practice
Mustafa Yildiz, History, UC Berkeley

The Person in Pain: A Genealogy of Bodily Experience
Matthew Soleiman, History, UC San Diego

Junior Faculty Manuscript Workshop

Transpacific Nonencounters: The Obfuscated Legacies of Racial Settler Colonialism Across Twentieth Century Japan and Mexico
Andrea Mendoza, Literature, UC San Diego

Transpacific Contaminations: Ecological Aesthetics and Cold War Afterlives
Heidi Amin-Hong, English, UC Santa Barbara

Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab
Sophia Azeb, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz

“We Are Non-Political:” Gender, Intellectual Thought, and the Development of Non-Political Nationalism in Nigeria
Maria Martin, History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Merced

Making Zone-A: Race, Nature, and Resilience on New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores
Ayasha Guerin, World Arts and Cultures/ Dance, UC Los Angeles

Rooted Movements: Radical Analytics and the Palestinian Poetics of Space
Amanda Bataresh, UC San Diego

The “Family Planned:” Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity
Ugo Edu, African American Studies, UC Los Angeles

Unruly: On a Genealogy of Afrodiasporic Women and Girls
Cathy Thomas, English, UC Santa Barbara

Black Livingness After Disaster: The Caribbean’s Struggle Against Ecological Imperialism
Keston Perry, African American Studies, UC Los Angeles

Reinvention and Colonialism in the Central Andes: The Archaeology of Huarochirí (Peru) through the Inka and Spanish Periods
Carla Hernández Garavito, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz

Bodies of Evidence: A History of ‘Rape Kit’ Protocols in U.S. Emergency Nursing and Global Humanitarian Medicine
Jaimie Morse, Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

Unfamiliar Waters: Filipinx Aesthetics against Extractive Capitalism
Trisha Remetir, Comparative Literatures and Languages, UC Riverside