February 17, 2025

The Institute for Advanced Study is delighted to announce twelve new Residential Faculty Fellows for 2025–2026.

Faculty fellows spend a semester in residence at the IAS. Together with the IAS Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows (who spend a full academic year in residence) and other scholars in residence, including the Visionary Community Fellow, residential fellows constitute a supportive interdisciplinary intellectual community in which they work intensively on their own research and creative projects. Fellows gather regularly to collaborate, discuss their work, and exchange ideas.

Fellowship awardees for Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 are:

Fall 2025

Sarah B. Buchanan

Associate Professor, French, Division of the Humanities, University of Minnesota Morris

Albinism in West African Cinema

Recently, several African films have criticized the persecution of people with albinism, but scholars have not yet published on the topic. I aim to fill this gap by exploring African spiritual beliefs, how they define albinism, and how they inform the average person’s perspectives. I will then use those beliefs to analyze the films Une Place pour moi by Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo (Rwanda 2016), Change ton coeur, pas ma couleur by Pierre-Antoine Carpentier (Senegal/France 2017), and Disappeared by Romario Tchoupou (Cameroon 2022). The first two are short films that showcase positive representations of individuals with albinism through humanizing them and making their struggles relatable. The third film is a feature about a girl with albinism struggling to get an education despite the prejudice and fear that she must confront. These films challenge deeply-held beliefs and plant the seeds for social change from within their cultures.
 

Aisha S. Ghani

Assistant Professor, Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Violence as Difference: Genealogies of Violence in Islam

My project aims to combine Islamic theological and exegetical analysis with comparative research methods in order to present three Islamic genealogies of violence. My project seeks to answer three questions: First, what can a theologically oriented analysis of the relationship between Islam and violence help us to understand about Islamic difference? Second, how does the question of violence mediate and inform Islamic conceptions of the human? Third, how can a comparative theological approach to questions of violence help us to more broadly understand the relationship between religion and violence?
 

Maggie Hennefeld

Professor, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Archives of Feminist Comedy

My project focuses on revealing the uproarious history of feminist film comedies that have been long unseen, poorly preserved, and even unrealized. I focus on examples from the early silent era to the present day where laughter erupts in the last place you would expect it. I consult institutional and unofficial film archives to unearth instances of subversive joy that exceed the constraints of the film genre and defy the imperatives of narrative sense-making. My project will theorize feminist comedy beyond its familiar comic sensibilities, develop an international filmography using International Federation of Film Archives listings, repertory catalogs, and personal interviews with archivists, and democratize access through curating these films and making them widely accessible beyond their archival enclosures. I envision this project as a book written for both academic readers and a broader audience of feminists and cinephiles.
 

Terresa Moses

Associate Professor, Design Innovation, College of Design, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Black Liberation X Design

I plan to produce a Black liberatory centered textbook (Black Liberation X Design) that explores how Black Liberation movements influence the creation of graphic design curricular projects. This textbook will provide opportunities for design educators and students to explore Black liberatory pedagogical approaches regardless of their proximity to the Black experience. This informative guide and textbook uses BlackCrit Theory to frame anti-Blackness as a “wicked” design problem which encourages colonial ways of knowing. This textbook is not only an instructive manual, but one that investigates how design is influenced by colonial ways of knowing and how a Black liberatory approach can influence design education. The fellowship will be used to help the explicit onboarding process and the curriculum framing for each of the nine projects.
 

Julie Schumacher

Regents Professor, English, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Shadow Box Narratives

My project strives to create three-dimensional collage narratives. I have long experimented with formal restrictions in my fiction, publishing my novel Dear Committee Members in the form of letters of recommendation, and writing short stories in the form of a board game, a syllabus, and a book proposal. I have also been dabbling in physical forms and structures, creating 3-D illustrated narratives composed of found objects accompanied by photographs and text, clippings from grammar, and penmanship and geography texts from the early twentieth century. This is an outgrowth and expansion of my creative practice which would be enriched in the context of other faculty who cross disciplines. I hope to benefit from resources in the departments of Art and Design and the nearby Minnesota Center for Book Arts.
 

Honghong Tinn

Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering / History of Science, Technology and Medicine; College of Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Viewing Wars from Afar: Civilians and International Conflicts in the Era of the Internet and Algorithmic Social Media

My second book project examines how the rise of the Internet and social media shapes civilian understanding of wars from the immediate post-Cold War era (1990s) to the present. It explores how the Internet and social media has changed Taiwanese civilians’ fears, anxieties, confusion, anger, and engagement with wars. I will conduct archival research, oral history interviews, digital ethnography, and survey-published sources, along with other primary sources available online. My project aims to contribute to the understanding of civilians’ technical knowledge of the Internet, algorithm-controlled social media, and military technologies in relation to their interpretations of wars. Through the study of anxiety of different eras through digital technologies, my project will bring together discussions from fields of the history of science and technology, mental health, media studies, and human-computer interaction.

Spring 2026

Aaron Alvarado

Assistant Professor, American Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Lupe’s Lessons: On Race, Agriculture, and Settler Rurality in the University of California

In the 1970s, students from the University of California exposed how an agriculture-focused fraternity used a derogatory song during initiation that elicited gender and sexual violence against Latinas. Through tracing responses to the song from activists, scholars, and administrators from the 1970s to the present, my project considers how the roots of the song’s violent depiction of Latinas lie in the University of California’s historic entanglements with settler colonialism, race, and agriculture. Far from marginal, this project’s exploration of the legacies of this song in the University of California system contributes to my larger book project’s analysis of California’s San Joaquin Valley; the broader book is an interdisciplinary history of race and California’s agricultural industry and how this intersection shaped the production and institutionalization of knowledge through California’s public research university system.
 

Karen Ho

Professor, Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Financial Afterlives: Elite Fraternal Networks and “Racial Financialization” in the Post-Liquidation Era

My book project approaches contemporary socioeconomic inequality and intensifying precarity through an examination of elite white fraternal networks of financial actors who continue to transform corporations and homes into components of short-term investment funds or portfolios. By apprehending the seemingly abstract and massive financial markets through fraternal and racialized networks, I attempt to unpack, ground, and detail the intimate workings and effects of “macro” processes. This book will be one of the first ethnographies to bring together an analysis of reactionary populism/racist scapegoating and intensifying financialization of multiple socioeconomic forms, most notably corporations and homes, through an investigation of networks of white men.
 

Jessica Lopez Lyman

Assistant Professor, Chicano and Latino Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Cultural Solutions for Climate Justice

Despite prolific scholarship on climate change, there has yet to be significant social change in the United States. Women of Color and Indigenous feminist scholars have argued that dispossession and the redistribution of resources, especially land, has been undergirded by racial capitalism, leading to environmental inequities in both rural and urban areas for Indigenous people and People of Color. There is a growing call for place-based studies that analyze local solutions and decentralized strategies. My second book project, Culture Cures: Women of Color and Indigenous Feminist Approaches to Climate Justice, will explore how artists across the United States, including Puerto Rico, are working towards creating social change by offering alternative cultural narratives, what I refer to as cultural change, in their local communities to combat climate injustices.
 

Evan Roberts

Assistant Professor, History of Medicine (Surgery), Medical School, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

“Such a rash act”: Wounding, capture, suicide, and the legacy of the Great War

Recent increases in suicide in the United States have brought renewed attention to the individual and social circumstances leading to suicide. However, there are few studies that focus on integrating individual life stories, public policies, and broader structural change. My book project shows how suicide can be reduced through the studying of veteran suicide in New Zealand in the twentieth century. Sending significant numbers to fight and with unusually rich records for studying soldiers’ lives and suicide, New Zealand is uniquely suited for this work. Suicide among World War II veterans was two-thirds the rate among World War I veterans over their lives, a result of different wartime experience, changes in health and social care, and improving economic security. Throughout my fellowship, I will complete two book chapters centered on the changing narratives of suicide in World War I veterans and the impact of traumatic wartime experiences throughout their later lives.
 

Darrius Stanley

Assistant Professor, Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development; College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Historicizing the Influence of the Lucy-Moten-FAMU High School on Black Communities in North Florida

My project aims to generate understandings of historically Black educational models as a means to better design education spaces that meet the needs of Black youth. I am proposing an intergenerational, historiographical examination of the Lucy Moten-Florida A&M University (FAMU) High School in Tallahassee, Florida. Lucy Moten-FAMU High was one of two schools in the region to offer Black people a high school education in the 1930s. This institution produced some of the greatest minds, athletes and leaders in Black, North Florida. Currently, there is no written record that captures the impact of the school on Black students and communities. As a fourth generation graduate of this institution, I am proposing an interdisciplinary examination of this prestigious institution which centers life history, photo-elicitation, and archival methodologies; this will culminate in a book and living, digital archive.
 

Christian Uwe

Associate Professor, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Poetry as Political Thought: Reading Precolonial Rwandan Poetry for our Times

We face a crisis of the fundamental ideas at the core of politics: the human, solidarity, dignity, relation. Whether in philosophy, science, or law, discussion of these ideas has heavily relied on Western systems of knowledge. This has prompted condemnation of epistemological bias which a growing number of leaders in the Global South invoke to voice skepticism about human rights and environmental policies. Yet, if the most pressing challenges we face today are global in character, cultural secession cannot be the answer. Poetry as Political Thought turns to an intellectual tradition from the South (i.e., precolonial Rwandan poetry) to argue that there is a way to reconcile cultural pluralism and a lateral universality. I read precolonial Rwandan poetry as providing a convincing case for this intuition and its political purchase.