Announcing UCHRI Grant Recipients for
2026-27
UCHRI is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2026-27 grants, which support a wide range of collaborative and individual faculty and graduate student research projects.
Multicampus Faculty Working Groups
Black Geographies of the Pacific
Justin Dunnavant, Anthropology, UC Los Angeles and Kaily Heitz, Geography, UC Los Angeles
Grounded In Land and Water: Indigenous Oceanian/ Pacific Islands Relationalities for Sustenance
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz; Kehalani Natsuko Vaughn, School of Education, UC Riverside; Christine Taitano DeLisle, Gender Studies/American Indian Studies, UC Los Angeles
Sustaining the Rule of Law
Jeannine DeLombard, English, UC Santa Barbara and Kathleen Moore, Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Vernaculars of Faith and Material Politics in the Maghreb
Muriam Haleh Davis, History, UC Santa Cruz and Margaux Fitoussi, Comparative Literature, UC Irvine
Trans and Queer Research Consortium
Roshanak Kheshti, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley
Engaging Humanities
The Abandoned: A P’ansori
Monica Youn, English, UC Irvine
UCLA-CBDIO Collaborative Mixtec Curriculum Development
Benjamin Eischens, Linguistics, UC Los Angeles
Music Teaching & Learning at the Women’s Resilience Center: Connecting Music Pedagogy and Refugee Services in San Diego County
Amy Cimini, Music, UC San Diego
Seeds of Resurgence
M. Ty, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Digitally Mapping the North Claiborne Corridor: Reconstructing Black Resistance, Place-Making, and Cultural Memory in New Orleans, 1865-1965
Anna Livia Brand, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley
The Illegally Well Graphic Novel and Un-Planner: Building Movement Sustenance through Undocumented Asian American Storytelling
Elizabeth Hanna Rubio, Gender and Sexuality Studies, UC Riverside
UC Underrepresented Faculty Mentorship Fellowship
Mentees
Lishan AZ, Cinema & Digital Media, UC Davis
Ruben Ochoa, Department of Art, UC Santa Barbara
Michelle Vasquez, Ruiz Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Erin Lam, Comparative Literature and Languages, UC Riverside
Clementine Bordeaux, History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz
Eraldo Souza dos Santos, Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine
Jorge Sánchez Cruz, Literature, UC San Diego
Laura Chávez-Moreno, Chicana/o & Central American Studies, UC Los Angeles
Bernardette Pinetta, Psychology, UC Riverside
Mentors
Zeinabu Irene Davis, Communication, UC San Diego
Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Visual Arts, UC San Diego
Rocío Rosales, Sociology, UC Irvine
micha cárdenas, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, UC Santa Cruz
Christine Taitano DeLisle, Gender Studies & American Indian Studies, UC Los Angeles
Sherene Seikaly, History, UC Santa Barbara
Natalia Brizuela, Spanish & Portuguese and Film & Media, UC Berkeley
Thomas Philip, School of Education, UC Berkeley
Gustavo Carlo, School of Education, UC Irvine
Faculty Summer Research Funding
Frank Matsura’s Okanogan Sublime: Immigrant Photography, Settler Colonialism, Native Survivance as Sustenance
Glen Mimura, Film and Media Studies, UC Irvine
The War on Terror’s Returns: Contract Relations and the Aesthetics of Imperial Accumulation
Najwa Mayer, Asian American Studies, UC Davis
A Pedagogical Grammar for Moocho’ (Mayan)
Jaime Pérez González, Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara
The Literary Discovery of Aztec Poetry (1826-1941)
David Colmenares, Comparative Literature, UC Irvine
Harvest of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and the Making of Revolutionary Cuba
Sara Kozameh, History, UC San Diego
Caring Robots: Automata, Service Work, and Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean
Lamia Balafrej, Art History, UC Los Angeles
Diggers: An Archival Counterhistory of Popular Music
David Novak, Music, UC Santa Barbara
Literary Heirlooms: Legal Bundles and Afro-Native Archival Practices
Eve Eure, Literature, UC San Diego
Worldmaking as Sustenance: Korean Art in Mongol Eurasia
Yong Cho, History of Art, UC Riverside
The Fiction of “Socialist AI”: Nationalism, Westness, and Techno-politics in China
Angela Li, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside
Graduate Dissertation Awards
The Anthropocene’s Post-Oasis: Designing Nature and Landscape in Southern California, 1945–65
Nicole Theresa King, Visual Arts, UC San Diego
Rubber Colonization and Indigenous Resistance in Early Narratives about the Amazon
Carlos Torres Astocondor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UC Davis
Small-Foot Detectives, Gossipy Aunties: A Gendered History of Grassroots Urban Governance in China, 1949 to the Present
Zhaorui Lu, History, UC Irvine
Becoming Embodied: Towards a Corporeal Approach to Trans Subjectivity
Wesleigh Gates, World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UC Los Angeles
“I See Concrete Where There Should Be Seeds”: Maya Worldmaking in the Wake of Infrastructure
Irma Losada Olmos, Geography, UC Los Angeles
Dante for All Ages: the Divine Comedy in Visual Media
Martina Mattei, Comparative Literature, UC Santa Barbara
Towards a Global Anti-Colonialism: Histories of Struggle Across Palestine, Ireland, South Africa, and the United States
Charles Finn, Global & International Studies, UC Irvine
Contained Materialisms: Canned Goods and the Matter of Transpacific Militarization in Performance
Janine Rogers, Theater, UC Los Angeles
Abolition’s Speculative Gestures: Becoming Ungovernable to the Time-space of the State
Jenna Wilson, English, UC Riverside
From Frontier Herb to Global Medicine: Ginseng and the Shaping of Early Modern Geographies of Materia Medica, 1644-1830
Audrey Ke Zhao, History, UC Santa Cruz
Documenting Women’s Literary Networks under the Chilean Dictatorship (1973–1990)
Paula Cucurella, Hispanic Studies, UC Riverside
Landscaping Violence: Ephemeral Representations of Anti-Immigrant Violence in the San Diego-Tijuana Borderlands
Hailee Menchaca, History, UC Riverside
Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward a Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970
Joe Riley, Visual Arts, UC San Diego
The Unraveling of the Self: Genre Hybridity in Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley and Vivian Gornick
Na’amit Sturm Nagel, English, UC Irvine
Medicine & Humanities: The Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White Graduate Student Scholarship
Gender, Health, and Social Completeness: Masculinity, Medicine, and the Making of Reproductive Bodies in Yoruba, Nigeria (1900-1960)
Oluwasola Daniels, History, UC Davis
So Hormonal: Estrogenic Bodies in the United States
Chloe Bell-Wilson, History, UC Los Angeles
Manuscript Workshop & Research Development
Cold War Disability: The Biopolitics of U.S. Military Empire in Post-1945 Global Asia
Ka-eul Yoo, Global and International Studies, UC Irvine
When Women United a World: Cihuatlamacazqueh as Sacred and Political Leaders in Aztec Mexico
Felicia Lopez, Literatures, Languages, and Cultures, UC Merced
Embodying Justice: Black Women Confront Intimate Partner Violence from Emancipation to the Vote
Jessica Millward, History and African American Studies, UC Irvine
Reinventing Negritude: African Women Poets and the Poetics of Decolonization
Gabriel Bámgbóṣé, Literature, UC San Diego
In Transit: Mobilities and Movidas in Chicana Aesthetic Practices, Post-Movimiento
Ariana Ruiz, Literature, UC San Diego
Chemical Diasporas: Tracing Toxicity through Ecological Kinship
Natalia Duong, Asian American Studies and Science and Technology Studies, UC Davis
Black Miami in the Eye of the Storm: Performing Black Sustainability
Mysia Anderson-White, Theatre and Dance, UC San Diego
Life in Absentia: Jewishness in Tunisia
Margaux Fitoussi, Comparative Literature & History, UC Irvine
Queer Production/Queer Reproduction: Sexual Panic and Politics in the 21st Century
Meg Wesling, Literature, UC San Diego
All the Women are Meeting: Black Women’s Solidarities in the Struggle for African Decolonization
Yatta Kiazolu, Global and International Studies, UC Irvine
The Dramatic Turn: Theater, Science, and Russian Literature
Valeria Mutc, German and Russian, UC Davis
Engineering Care: Migrants and Robots Amid the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Aging Japan
Suma Ikeuchi, East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies,UC Santa Barbara
Imagined California: Emergency Poetics and Transfronter///Rhizo Gnosis and Praxis at the Tijuana/San Diego Borderlands
Jorge Omar Ramírez Pimienta, Spanish and Portuguese,UC Santa Barbara
The Latina Fixxxation: A History of Latinas in the Adult Industry
Yessica Garcia Hernandez, Chicana/o and Central American Studies,UC Los Angeles
Kings from Below: How Egyptians Navigated Royal Power in the Middle Kingdom
Luiza Osorio G. Silva, Art History, UC Irvine
Sex and Security in the Place of Nature
Kathleen Frederickson, English, UC Davis
The Labor of the State: Unfree Workers and the Making of Paraguay’s First Republic (1811-1870)
Mariana Katz, History, UC San Diego
Counter-Security Media: Trans Latinx Creative Resistance Across Carceral, Bureaucratic, and Digital Borders
Dan Bustillo, Gender Studies, UC Los Angeles
Staging Private Spheres: Theaters of the Domestic in Postwar and Contemporary Japan
Jessica Nakamura, Theater and Dance, UC Santa Barbara
Writing in Clave: Music and Poetry in the Caribbean
Charlie Hankin, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Davis
