The Institute for Advanced Study is delighted to announce eleven new Residential Faculty Fellows for 2026–2027.
Spanning disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, arts, and design, next year’s fellows will pursue research and creative work that engages some of the most pressing questions facing our communities and our world. Their projects explore topics including global perspectives on equitable health systems and mobility infrastructures, Indigenous sovereignty and archival justice, environmental histories and the local impact of forever chemicals, as well as cultural and artistic methods of resistance and refusal. Together, the 2026-27 cohort reflects the Institute for Advanced Study’s commitment to advancing groundbreaking research and interdisciplinary collaboration that informs public policy, economic systems, and social wellbeing here in Minnesota and on a global scale.
Faculty fellows spend a semester in residence at the IAS alongside our Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows and Visionary Community Fellow. Composed of faculty of different ranks and standing from disciplines all across the University of Minnesota, residential fellows constitute a supportive interdisciplinary intellectual community in which they work intensively on their own research and creative projects. Fellows also gather regularly for workshops, seminars, and more to collaborate, discuss their work, and exchange ideas. Congratulations to the new cohort of fellowship awardees!
Fall 2026
Tamara Fakhoury
Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Reasons to Resist
What does it mean to resist injustice? When is resistance morally justified, and when is it meaningful? Reasons to Resist explores these questions, reshaping debates about what counts as resistance and what gives it value. It argues that resistance need not be public, communicative, or morally pristine to matter. Many acts of resistance fall outside familiar models of protest, and their motivations are more varied than often assumed. Rather than treating duty as the primary measure of value, the book proposes a broader ethical framework that understands resistance as a way of grappling with morally fraught conditions. It emphasizes that small, daily refusals and quiet acts of agency can be every bit as important as visible forms of political action. In this view, resisting injustice is not only a moral duty, but integral to living a meaningful life under oppression.
Dingru Huang
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Between Animal and Machine: Ecologizing Modernisms in Wartime China
In a time of destruction and division, how can we envision connections with human and nonhuman others? With this inquiry, my research examines the works by Chinese and international writers, artists, and scientists active in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945). Shifting from human-centric imaginations of war, I intend to reveal how cultural creators sought to redefine the human condition in relation to animals and machines through various media. This project will demonstrate how mechanized warfare was experienced as an ecological event; and, seen afresh through this ecological lens, how twentieth-century Chinese literary and media production and its transnational network were significantly shaped by encounters between human and nonhuman actors. The results of this research will be developed into a book manuscript and will be incorporated into a pedagogical exhibition.
Rotem Tamir
Art, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Latitude 33°
Latitude 33° is an interdisciplinary art and research project that examines Iraqi gold jewelry as a living archive of migration, gender, and cultural memory. Building on my long-term practice connecting sculpture, craft, and Jewish studies, the project explores how ornamental traditions carry the stories and resilience of Jewish women who migrated from Iraq to Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Through sculptural experimentation, writing, and collaboration across art, materials science, and Jewish cultural scholarship, Latitude 33° reconsiders beauty and ornament as languages of strength, continuity, and belonging across generations.
Wayne Soon
History of Medicine, Department of Surgery, Medical School, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Best Practices Matter: Promoting Equitable Healthcare through Global Advocacy of Universal Health Insurance
My proposed IAS project examines how and why global experts became instrumental in promoting greater access and equity in healthcare from the 1960s to the present. I explore how their efforts challenged dominant ideas of efficiency-based actuarial science practice, which prioritized austerity, cost recovery, and personal responsibility in designing and implementing health insurance systems. Through the case studies of transnational health insurance histories of Taiwan, the United States, Japan, China, and Singapore, I investigate how health economists, documentary filmmakers, and workers’ rights activists nourished cultures of equitable care and promoted universal health insurance programs that challenged constructed notions of austerity and inequalities. My project brings together discussions from the fields of the history of medicine, public health, economics, and political science.
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
How Demography Constrains and Enables Ideational Persistence and Change
I propose to develop rigorous models of experience and historical memory as they are carried through family ties, and use them to develop novel, testable hypotheses about how demography has constrained and enabled political and cultural change. I will develop these ideas initially in the context of the Black freedom struggles in the United States, although the models are more general. This project will develop a framework that describes individuals’ closest genealogical ties to foundational moments, developing tools that can aid a new research program to understand how demography enables or constraints political possibilities by creating a demographic context that creates greater or lesser possibility for historical events to be made salient by political actors.
Spring 2027
Nick Estes
American Indian Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Red Power/Red Scare: Archives of Repression and Indigenous Resistance
Red Power/Red Scare: Archives of Repression and Indigenous Resistance is a critical archival project using data collected from tens of thousands pages of police and military surveillance documents against Red Power activists. This project refuses to treat carceral and police archives as neutral repositories of fact and instead treats them as part of an archival war waged against Indigenous social movements in the United States. Engaging police and colonial archives critically becomes an act of Indigenous refusal and resurgence, recasting how we understand policing against Indigenous movements for LandBack and sovereignty in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.
Elliot James
History, Division of Social Sciences, University of Minnesota Morris
Humanizing Transport: Mobility Justice in South Africa, and Its Discontents
Big Tech mistakes the world’s transportation systems for neutral solutions to remedy division in society, but my research interrogates the failure to bring people together on equal ground in history. This project magnifies transportation as one of South Africa’s most urgent, unresolved questions of reparative justice. I employ "mobility justice" as a core analytical framework to make better sense of policy debates to improve transportation through data mining, and instead trace the long-term, embodied imaginations, realities, and consequences of the advancement of these infrastructures on gender-based violence, public health, and social cohesion. I envision this monograph as a tool to help build a future of safe and equitable transport for all, not just as expert book data to be bought and sold in the interest of further capitalizing transportation in the technology marketplace.
Alice Lovejoy
Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Surface and Memory: A Media and Environmental History of Tape
This project considers the intertwining between memory and technology in the context of Minnesota’s media and environmental histories. The project’s focus is the 3M company and its former “Memory Technologies” division, whose largest product line was in magnetic audio- and videotape. I examine the Hutchinson and Cottage Grove, MN factories where 3M’s tape was made, and consider the environmental mark that tape manufacturing left on the state: hazardous waste, toxic emissions, and forever chemicals. Drawing on an interdisciplinary array of methods and literatures, I ask: if tape’s surfaces were crucial carriers of personal and institutional memory in the late 20th century, what other traces and memories has its manufacturing left in the ground, in water, and in bodies? Broadly, then, the project probes the relationship between surface and memory, media-technological and environmental.
Rahsaan Mahadeo
African American & African Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
When the Hands of Time are Cold as I.C.E.: The interminability of deportation
While it is convenient to study deportation in spatial terms, ignoring the temporal orientation of deportation remains a pitfall of migration studies. I argue that deportation creates not only a spatial void, but a temporal one. This research will explore how children of deportees reckon with parental incarceration and deportation. I will specifically explore the various strategies families use to sustain both relationships and temporal continuity. The interminability of deportation is a reminder that deportation is a process and not an event. Through in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation with deportees and their families, and existing partnerships with local migrant justice organizations, my aim is to amplify calls and advance efforts to end border imperialism by highlighting the role of deportation in removing not just people, but relationships, experiences, and time.
Kathryn Nuernberger
Creative Writing/English, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
A Natural History of War: Poems
A Natural History of War will be a collection of poems that consider how the history of science, the practice of making art, and the invention of universities dovetail with the creation of ever more “ingenious” weapons used in horrifyingly creative fashions. Knowing how much funding an R-1 institution receives from Department of Defense Contracts and other forms of military spending, and remembering that even the Iowa Writers’ Workshop received CIA funds at one time, this book seeks to tell a true story about what it means to learn, create, imagine, and dream at the heart of the empire.
Malini Srivastava
Landscape Architecture and Interior Design, School of Architecture, College of Design, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Material Stories: A Cookbook of Marginalized Material Practices
My vision for the IAS fellowship is to produce a cookbook-style manuscript combining essays, recipes, illustrations, and visualizations of non-extractive material practices for built environments from the Global South. The past three years of research and database building in this topic area reveal that most publications on non-extractive material practices in the built environment focus on the Global North. By the fellowship start, I will have spent 18 months conducting discussions, interviews, and field visits across the Global South. Essays will explore extractive histories and propose just, regenerative alternatives through nine materiality themes and case studies. Accompanying recipes will guide designers, educators, and students in creating adaptive, context-specific material lifecycles.