We are thrilled to announce two Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows joining the Institute for Advanced Study for 2025–2026.
Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows spend a year in residence at the IAS. Together with our Faculty Fellows, Visionary Community Fellow, postdocs, and other scholars in residence, they contribute to a supportive interdisciplinary intellectual community in which they work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas.
One incoming IDF, Malay Kotal, joins the IAS early this summer as a MnDRIVE Human in the Data Summer Graduate Fellow.
We look forward to welcoming each of these scholars to our community!
2025–26 Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows in Residence
Hannah Schwendeman
“Aging and Dying in Prison: The Ethics of Care in the Era of Mass Incarceration”
Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
The U.S. prison population is rapidly aging as an unprecedented number of older adults live and die behind bars (Widra 2023). In the era of mass incarceration, how are U.S. state prisons responding to the expanding population of aging and dying prisoners? Through interviews and legal archival analysis, my dissertation investigates how U.S. state prisons are transforming to provide end-of-life care. Connecting philosophy and other humanistic approaches to socio-legal studies, this study offers insights into fundamental moral questions of death and dying at the understudied site of the prison, where punishment and healthcare collide.
Malay Kotal
“Identities on the Move: Working-Class Migration and the Contestation of Bengali Personhood”
Department of Geography, Environment & Society, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Circular migration is emerging as a site of aspirational self-making that is transforming what it means to be Bengali. My research ethnographically examines how the growing circular movement of working-class Bengalis from West Bengal in eastern India to Kerala in southern India is transforming the dominant, elite notion of this ethnolinguistic identity. Residency at IAS will cross-pollinate my geographical understanding of migration with subaltern historical thinking on subject formation, which is necessary to develop a new conceptual framework of ethnolinguistic identity as a marker that encodes but can also disrupt existing social hierarchies.