Announcing UCHRI Grant Recipients for
2025-26
UCHRI is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2025-26 grants, which support a wide range of collaborative and individual faculty and graduate student research projects. This year, we are especially excited for the budding public humanities projects on food as well as various public history projects, work on community interpreting in healthcare, and an Indigenous comic convention.
Multicampus Faculty Working Groups
Defying Defaults in Technology and Culture
Amy Skjerseth, Music, UC Riverside
Ecologies of War
Eleana Kim, Anthropology, UC Irvine
Media, Consolidation & Democracy: Linking Cultural Research with Data Resources
Shawna Kidman, Communication, UC San Diego and Andrew deWaard, Communication, UC San Diego
Undisciplining Palestine: Global, Systemic, & Analytic Entanglements
Amanda Batarseh, Literature, UC San Diego and Jennifer Mogannam, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Engaging Humanities
Edible Entanglements: Community Food Justice Organizations, Race, Environment and Ethics
Arvind Thomas, English, UC Los Angeles
Esculent: A Public Humanities Podcast About Food
Daniela Gutierrez Flores, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Davis
Aquatic Arts in Africa and the Diaspora
Kevin Dawson, History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Merced
Walking with the Comrades: A Public History of Farm Labor Justice and Chicanx Studies
Christian Paiz, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Unearthing Legacies: South County Black History Research and Preservation Initiative
Flora Lu, Environmental Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Community Interpreting and Translation for Healthcare: Community Co-Creation
Covadonga Lamar Prieto, Hispanic Studies, UC Riverside
2025 Indigi-Con
Kathryn Walkiewicz, Literature, UC San Diego
UC Underrepresented Scholars
Mentees
AJ Rice, Political Science, UC Santa Barbara
Lorena Alvarado, Global Arts, Media and Writing Studies, UC Merced
Ariana Ruiz, Literature, UC San Diego
Emily Celeste Vázquez Enriquez, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Davis
José Manuel Santillana Blanco, American Studies, UC Davis
Asia Bento, Sociology, UC Irvine
Henry Washington, Jr., African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley
Gabriel Bámgbóṣé, Literature, UC San Diego
Ruben Zecena, English, UC Davis
Alejandra Reyes Ruiz del Cueto, Urban Planning and Public Policy, UC Irvine
Omar Ramírez Pimienta, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Santa Barbara
Mengyang (Zoe) Zhao, Sociology, UC Santa Cruz
Yessica Garcia Hernandez, Chicana/o and Central American Studies, UC Los Angeles
Rebecca Wear, Performance, Play, and Design, UC Santa Cruz
Ka-eul Yoo, Global and International Studies, UC Irvine
Mentors
Suk-Young Kim, Theater and Performance Studies, UC Los Angeles
Richard Rodriguez, English, UC Riverside
Amalia Cabezas, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside
Whitney Pirtle, Community Health Sciences, UC Los Angeles
Amy Carroll, Literature, UC San Diego
Viviane Mahieux, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Irvine
Jigna Desai, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Donna Jones, English, UC Berkeley
Christopher Stout, Political Science, UC San Diego
John Alba Cutler, English, UC Berkeley
Uri McMillan, English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and African-American Studies, UC Los Angeles
Eric Stanley, Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley
Andrew Jolivétte, Sociology & Afro-Indigenous Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Rafael Pérez-Torres, English, UC Los Angeles
Mai Nguyen, Urban Studies and Planning, UC San Diego
Multicampus Graduate Student Working Groups
Documentary Gaming Collective: Blending Alternate Reality Games and Documentary Theater
Iliya Giyahchi, Performance Studies, UC Davis
Crisis and Connection: Trans Entanglements in Precarious Times
Jake Knight, Cultural Studies, UC Davis
Entangled Futures of Languages and Technologies: Speculative and Inclusive Approaches to AI and Linguistic Diversity
Mariam Nadirashvili, Spanish, UC Riverside
Faculty Summer Research Funding
A Multimethod Approach to Mapping College Opportunity in a Small Town in California’s Central Coast
Mayra Puente, Education, UC Santa Barbara
Mapping the Black Pacific: 19th-Century Maritime Mobility as a Black Spatial Practice
Caroline Collins, Urban Studies and Planning, UC San Diego
Mountainous ‘Margins’ and Entangled Histories in the Caspian Space
Lara Fabian, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UC Los Angeles
Entangled Communities: Photo Essay of Immigration in the Ancient Andes
Cassandra Scaffidi, Anthropology & Heritage Studies, UC Merced
Militarized Threads: Fashioning Empire Through The Aloha Shirt
Christen Sasaki, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Naming Freedom: Enslaved Women, Newborns, and the Social Practice of Freedom in Eighteenth-Century Brazil
John Marquez, History, UC Riverside
Rhythmic Entanglements of Race and Gender in Afro-Caribbean Poetry
Charlie Hankin, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Davis
Mobilizing Grief: Dominican Feminisms and Caribbean Human Rights
Génesis Lara, Chicano/Latino Studies, UC Irvine
Antarctica in a World After Empire
Rebecca Herman, History, UC Berkeley
Ghosts of the Machine Age: A Scientific Family, A Haunted Empire, and the Prehistory of AI
Benjamin Breen, History, UC Santa Cruz
Graduate Dissertation Awards
Queering the State of Exception: LGBTIQ Resistance Amidst Carceral Regimes in El Salvador
Katherine Funes, Global & International Studies, UC Irvine
The City Before the Smart: Community & Smart Cities
Himali Singh Thakur, English, UC Davis
Revolutionary Leadership: Free People of Color in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue
Jungki Min, History, UC Santa Barbara
“Fit to Work”: Repairing Injury and the Making of Bodily Ability in Industrial Pakistan
Ramsha Usman, Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara
Feminist Relationality in the Americas: Women’s Practices in Filmmaking & Quilting
Amy Reid, Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz
Whose Consent Matters? Scientific Experimentation and The Monkey Problem of St. Kitts
Bri Matusovsky, Humanities and Social Sciences, UC San Francisco
Policing the Village: Criminality, Bureaucracy, and Land in Rural Egypt (1833-1914)
Salma Shash, History, UC Santa Barbara
Unruly Modernity: The Making of Queer Beijing in Postsocialist China
Nathan Shui, Architecture, UC Berkeley
Indigenous Games in Latin America: Production, Access, and Resistance
Nico Valdivia Hennig, Hispanic Studies, UC Riverside
Genealogies of the Nation-State and the (In)Human: A Monstrous History of the Late Ottoman Empire
Emre Keser, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
Pedestals of Absence: The Ephemeral Practice of Public Art in Turkey
Hande Sever, Visual Arts, UC San Diego
One-Dimensional Climate: Los Angeles at the Crossroads of Climate History
Benjamin Kaplan Weinger, Geography, UC Los Angeles
Medicine & Humanities: The Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White Graduate Student Scholarship
Environmental Health in Negative: A Literary and Ethnographic Approach to Health Justice in Petrochemical Catalonia
Kathryn Gougelet, Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz
Mother, Heal Thyself: Late Antique Pregnancy, Religion, and Power
Misa Nguyen, History, UC Santa Barbara
Manuscript Workshop & Research Development
Her Stories of the Mexican Revolution: Women, Migration, and Violence Across the US-Mexico Borderlands
Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, History, UC Santa Barbara
Material Affect and Space: Censored Visual Culture in Revolutionary Cuba
Marta Hernández Salván
Fossil Fuel Divestment as Method
Mukul Kamar, Urban Planning and Public Policy, UC Irvine
Histories of Food, Ecology, and Culture in Southern California
Nancy Kwak, History, UC San Diego
Writing Yourself into the Academic Job Market
Michael Moses, Higher Education Administration & Policy, UC Riverside
Pueblo Autonomy: Indigenous Communal Practices Across Settler Borders
Brenda Nicolas, Global and International Studies, UC Irvine
Race, Empire, and Federalism in Colonial India
Aniket De, History, UC San Diego
Mixed Race Moors
Kyle Grady, English, UC Irvine
Debtors’ Unions: Countervailing Power and Abolitionist Presence in the Age of Finance
Hannah Appel, Anthropology, UC Los Angeles
Dark Material: Jamaica, Mysticism, Aesthetics
Nadia Ellis, English, UC Berkeley
Local Power at Work: Law and Politics in Urban Angola
Sylvia Croese, Global and International Studies, UC Irvine
Cinema as Contraband: The Transregional Corridor from Bombay to Dubai (1977-1993)
Silpa Mukherjee, Literature, UC San Diego
Still / Life: Trans Genre and the Politics of Anti-Development
Ava L.J. Kim, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, UC Davis
Spectacles of Relation: Race, Performance, and the Latinx Nineteenth Century
Christofer Rodelo, Chicano/Latino Studies, UC Irvine
Lumpen Theory: Notes from the Sex Worker Left
Heather Berg, Gender Studies and Labor Studies, UC Los Angeles
The Spirit of Modernism/o: Spanish-Language Newspapers, Literature, and Latinidad
John Alba Cutler, English, UC Berkeley
Reading Sideways: Queer and Asian Diasporic Approaches to Regency Novels & Adaptation
Lillian Lu, Literature, UC San Diego
