The Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts (DCHA) is delighted to welcome its new class of fellows for the 2024–2025 academic year. The DCHA’s residential research fellowships provide a full-year release from teaching and service to six UT tenure-stream faculty members and four UT graduate students from departments affiliated with the Center. This year’s incoming fellows represent the fields of Africana studies, Classics, history, world languages, philosophy, and religious studies. Their research ranges in scope from pre-colonial African spiritual traditions and gendered writing practices in modern China, to early modern Latin in translation and political operatives in nineteenth-century Washington, D.C. In addition to these ten research fellows, the Denbo Center also hosts a one-semester digital humanities research fellowship for a UT faculty member whose digital work directly engages humanities research.
Faculty Research Fellows:
Salvador Bartera, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics
Project Title: Bernardino Stefonio, S.J., Flavia Tragoedia: critical edition, English translation, and commentary
Kristen Block, Associate Professor, Department of History
Project Title: Desire, Corruption, and Healing in Early Caribbean Transcultural Flows
Marcus Harvey, Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Project Title: “Life is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Hermeneutics
Noriko Horiguchi, Associate Professor, Department of World Languages & Cultures
Project Title: Milk and the Making of Modern Japan: A Cultural History
Xuefei Ma, Assistant Professor, Department of World Languages & Cultures
Project Title: Trans(re)lation of Women’s Scripts: Personal Stories and Nested Feminisms from Rural China to the Sinophone World
Danielle Procope Bell, Assistant Professor, Department of Africana Studies
Project Title: Dispersed Domesticities: Uncovering Black Feminist/ Feminine Thought (1892–1920)
Graduate Student Research Fellows:
Mehtap Ince, Department of World Languages & Cultures
Project Title: A Cross-Textual Event Analysis based on German Short Stories
Amanda Klug, Department of History
Project Title: Memories of the Constitutional Convention, 1787–1861
Linh Mac, Department of Philosophy
Project Title: Krinostic Injustice
Kyle Vratarich, Department of History
Project Title: “Distinguished Scoundrel”: General Orville Babcock, The Whiskey Ring and the Dawn of a New Breed of Political Operative
Digital Humanities Faculty Fellow:
Jamal-Jared Alexander, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Project Title: A Social Action Toolkit
The Denbo Center’s residential fellowships are made possible by support from the UT Chancellor’s Office, the Office of Research and Engagement, our affiliated arts and humanities departments, and the College of Arts and Sciences. Fellows are selected through a competitive process and their applications are scored by an external panel of reviewers. They use their year at the Denbo Center to finish long-term research undertakings such as books, digital projects, or dissertations. Residency includes participating in the life of the Center by working at the DCHA, presenting work in progress, and engaging with other fellows and with visiting scholars in once-weekly Chandler Seminars.
Read more about this year’s fellows and their projects on our website.
Each year, the DCHA also welcomes the Marco Institute’s Haslam Dissertation Fellow to join the cohort of fellows. Also invited to participate in fellows’ events are those faculty who applied for our faculty fellowship but won and accepted national fellowships such as the ACLS or NEH fellowships.
2024–2025 Affiliated Fellows:
Stacie Beach, Department of History; Marco Haslam Dissertation Fellow
Project Title: Arbitration and Conciliation: A Social History of Imperial Petitions and Rescripts, 200–450
Aris Moreno Clemons, Assistant Professor, Department of World Languages & Cultures
National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow
Daniel Magilow, Professor, Department of World Languages & Cultures
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Kelli Wood, Assistant Professor, School of Art
Villa I Tatti – Harvard University Berenson Fellow