Announcing UCHRI Grant Recipients for
2023-24

UCHRI is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2023-24 grants, which support a wide range of collaborative and individual faculty and graduate student research projects, many of which engage with broader publics and explore new modes of collaboration. This year, we are especially excited for our Work & Refuge program engaging with critical university studies and graduate professionalization, as well as the continuation of the multi-cohort Underrepresented Scholars Fellowship program, which has doubled in size since last year.

Engaging Humanities

Asylum for the Arts and Center for the Refugee Poetics: A Collaborative Festival
Mai-Linh Hong, Literatures, Languages and Cultures, UC Merced
Ma Vang, History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Merced

Revisiting Island of the Blue Dolphins
Sara Weld, Germanic and Slavic Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Watsonville is in the Heart: Mapping a Recuperative History of Filipino Farmworkers
Kathleen Gutierrez, History, UC Santa Cruz
Catherine Ceniza Choy, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Work and Refuge

A Reflection on Multiple Job Markets and their Present Promises and Perils for Graduate Students
Larissa Saco, Sociology, UC Davis

Academic Professionalization as Refuge and Refusal: Lessons from Graduate School and Migrant Mutual Aid Work
Jeremy Rud, Linguistics, UC Davis

The University’s Two Bodies: Crip Labor as/of Survival
Andrew David King, English, UC Berkeley

The Academy: Refuge or Business-as-Usual in a Neoliberal America?
Rose Dwyer, Music, UC San Diego

Genres of Superfluity: (Dis)possession and Exile in the Global Historical Novel
Ashwin Bajaj, Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

Baggage Claim: On the Grief We Can and Cannot Carry
Nirvana Shahriar, English, UC Santa Barbara

But Does My Labor Love Me Back? Toward Refuge in Love, University-Social Practice, and Poetry
Kendall Grady, Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Worlding Higher Education in the Post-Cold War Era: The University in the “Asian Century”
Joshua Tan, History, UC Santa Cruz

Queering Migrations [from the South]: Theoretical Perspectives and Professional Insights
Yuri Fraccaroli, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Barbara

The Academic Borderlands: On Learning from Gloria Anzaldúa
Samantha Solis, English, UCLA

UC Underrepresented Scholars

Mentees:
Cathy Thomas, English, UC Santa Barbara
Elyse Ambrose, Religious Studies and Black Studies, UC Riverside
Philana Payton, Film and Media Studies, UC Irvine
Yatta Kiazolu, Global and International Studies, UC Irvine
Felicia Lopez, Literatures, Languages and Cultures, UC Merced
Valentina Montero Román, English, UC Irvine
Jasmine Young, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside
Christian Ruvalcaba, Languages and Applied Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz
Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval, Philosophy, UC Davis
Veronica Castillo-Munoz, History, UC Santa Barbara
Mayra Puente, Department of Education, UC Santa Barbara
Courtney Baker, English, UC Riverside

Mentors:
Daina Berry, College of Letters and Sciences, UC Santa Barbara
Ula Taylor, African American Studies, UC Berkeley
Nadia Ellis, English, UC Berkeley
Hannah Ginsborg, Philosophy, UC Berkeley
Xavier Livermon, Critical race and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Bridget Cooks, Art History and African American Studies, UC Irvine
Dora Zhang, English and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
Sam Museus, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Andrés Reséndez, History, UC Davis
Gabriela Caballero, Linguistics, UC San Diego
Daphne Taylor-Garcia, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Zeinabu Davis, Communications, UC San Diego

Short-Term Collaborative Research Residency

Transits: Keywords for Critical Refugee Studies
Khatharya Um, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Yến Lê Espiritu, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Multicampus Graduate Student Working Groups

The California Ideology Project
Shaun Terry, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
Kyle Proehl, Comparative Literature, UC Davis

Refusing to be Refugees: Mapping Sites of Chicanx/Latinx Defiance and Activism in California
Daisy Herrera, History, UC Riverside

Beyond the Safe Space: Theorizing Spaces of Trans and Queer Refuge
Maria Silk, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Towards a Critical Fugitive Transdisciplinary Methodology
Seyfullah Ozkurt, Political Science, UC Irvine

Fashion as Refuge and the Refusal of Fashion
Jeppe Ugelvig, History of Art and Visual Cultures, UC Santa Cruz
Edward Salazar, Latin American and Latino Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Faculty Summer Research Funding 

Mexicans and Central Americans in Eastern Europe: International Migration, Exploitation and Labor Practices in Poland
Giovanni Batz, Chicana and Chicano Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Nancy and Matilda Spear: Wiyot Survival on the Lost Coast
Kathleen Whiteley, Native American Studies, UC Davis

The Global Cold War and its Refugees
Kevin Kim, History, UC Los Angeles

Coastal and Riverine Marronage in West Africa: Enslaved Labor, Maritime Desertion, and the Making of Free Communities in the Waterscapes of Colonial Sierra Leone
Myles Ali, History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Merced

Beyond the Kitchen: B. Smith and the Legacy of Black Women’s Cultural Work
Kimberly Nettles-Barcelon, African American and African Studies, UC Davis

Asian American Elsewheres: Placeness, Confrontations, and Continuations
Lucy Burns, Asian American Studies, UC Los Angeles

Revolutionary Encounters: Race, Ideology, and Exile in Mexico and Spain
Kevan Aguilar, UC Irvine, History

Sexting by Carrier Pigeon: LGBTQ Sexual Cultures across the History of Communication Technologies
Bo Ruberg, UC Irvine, Film and Media Studies

Trans Without Borders: Displaced Sovereignty, Transtopia, and the Politics of Historical Difference
Howard Chiang, UC Davis, History

Glocal Histories of Exile and Activism in the University of California
Long Bui, UC Irvine, Global and International Studies

Conference Grants

Slavery and Technology in Greco-Roman Worlds
Colin Webster, Classics, UC Davis

Embodying Caste, Re-casteing the Body
Anusha Kedhar, Dance, UC Riverside

Project Paradiso: A Gateway to Dante’s Heaven
Filippo Gianferrari, Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Graduate Dissertation Awards

The Political Economy of Dehumanization: Social Decomposition, Ecological Pessimism, and the Crisis of Humanity
Justin Kay, Cultural Studies, UC Davis

Building a House, Crafting a State: Syrian-Circassian Wartime Migration in Abkhazia
Gehad Abaza, Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara

The Total History of the Bengal Famine of 1769-70
Monish Borah, History, UC Irvine

America is in the Heartland: Land Politics, Immigration, and Rural Asian America, 1860-1950
Donna Anderson, History, UC Santa Barbara

Artistic Agency in the Contemporary Indian Anglophone Picture Book: A Study of Pardhan Gond Aesthetics and Tara Books
Samarth Singhal, English, UC Riverside

Mixed-Race Problematics: Theorizing a Multiracial Interpretive Position for Contemporary Dance
Miya Shaffer, World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UC Los Angeles

“Now I am Going to Tell You about Sir Hector Macdonald”: A Cultural Biography of Memorialization and Child Sexual Abuse in the British Empire
Kristen Thomas-McGill, History, UC Santa Barbara

Vaudeville to Netflix: One Hundred Years of Jewish Comediennes
Thaïs Miller, Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Fossil-Fueled Fictions: Coal, Oil, and the Making of American Literary Modernity (1900-1950)
Megan Cole, English, UC Irvine

Genealogies of Chamorro-Filipino Resistance: (Re)mapping Chamorro-Filipino Stories of Place in Guåhan
Josephine Ong, Gender Studies, UC Los Angeles

Multicampus Faculty Working Groups

Black Feminist Healing Arts
Adeola Oni-Orisan, Family & Community Medicine, UC Davis
Ugo Edu, African American Studies, UC Los Angeles

Indigenous Borderlands: Refusal and Fugitivity
Amrah J. Salomon, English, UC Santa Barbara
Susy Zepeda, Chicano and Chicana Studies, UC Davis

Marxist Institute for Research
Joshua Clover, English, UC Davis
Charmaine Chua, Department of Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Annie McClanahan, English, UC Irvine

Envisioning a New Monster Studies: Resisting Global Discourses of Exclusion
Renee Fox, Literature, UC Santa Cruz
Michael Chemers, Performance, Play, and Design, UC Santa Cruz

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

Dysgenic Proportions: Gendered Science, Racial Defects, and the Making of Disability in California, 1900-1930
Isidro González, History, UC Santa Barbara

Gothic Therapies: Medicine, Literature, and the Healing Imagination, 1764-1820
Sarah O’Dell, English, UC Irvine

Special Humanists at Work Grant

Philosophy Works: An Exploration of Careers for Philosophers Outside of Academia
Carolyn Jennings, Cognitive and Information Sciences, UC Merced