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Update:

This page is under review after the issuance of the "Dear Colleague" letter from the U.S. Department of Education and the Notice of Civil Rights Term and Condition of Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Residential Fellowships

The Humanities Research Center’s annual residential fellowships are awarded to 4-6 faculty members and at least one Ph.D. student per year. The goal is to foster intellectual exchange and to enhance the quality of research at VCU by exposing faculty to different perspectives and methodologies. Fellows meet as a group once a week during the Fellows' Seminar to discuss their works-in-progress. Fellows are given the opportunity to give public presentations about their projects during the academic year following their residency at the Center. Publications resulting from this fellowship program must acknowledge the Center’s support.

Faculty Residential Fellowships

Graduate Student Residential Fellowships

2024-25 Residential Fellows

Chris Cynn

Chris Cynn, PhD

Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies

“Archives from the Future: Imagining Otherwise in Ugandan and South African Texts”

I propose to draft a chapter of my book, Archives from the Future: Imagining Otherwise in Ugandan and South African Texts. The chapter, “Revising the Past: Mary Karooro Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu,” explores how The Invisible Weevil (1998), and Kintu (2014) engage with Intense debates in Uganda around state attempts to regulate sex and sexual practices, especially through HIV prevention campaigns emphasizing abstinence and fidelity, and through draconian legislation targeting “homosexuals.” While state policies invoke specifically African traditions to reinforce their contemporary definitions of family, and therefore of communal and national identities and belonging, the novels insist on the crucial role of literature in documenting and remembering ways of living that exceed such authorized accounts. Irreducible to anthropological evidence or historical record, they reframe temporality and causality, merging past and present, history and myth, the supernatural and the rational, philosophy and critique. Underscoring the limits of the terms of the promise of (post)coloniality, they raise awareness about the racial and gendered inequities limiting whose stories are told and preserved and challenge dominant epistemologies to open possibilities for alternative potential futures.

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Rebecca Gibson, PhD

Teaching Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Department of World Studies

“Well Heeled: A Bioarchaeology of the Shoe”

Think about the shoes you wear--their construction, the materials that go into making them, the way they fit and feel on your feet.  Contemplate slipping your foot into the perfect shoe.  What would that feel like?  What would it look like?  How would your feet react to being perfectly surrounded and supported?  Unless something goes wrong with our shoes, or we spy a particularly cute pair, we may not ever ask ourselves these questions about something so necessary as the shoes we wear every day.  

During this Residential Faculty Fellowship, I will work on my book project examining the physical effect of shoes through history, and is titled Well Heeled: A Bioarchaeology of the Shoe. It is currently under contract with publisher Palgrave Macmillan. When the Fellowship year begins, I will have completed two field seasons, and will be coordinating my third for Summer ’26. The Fellowship gives me the space and time to concentrate on that coordination as well as the attendant research and writing up, and will be invaluable. Well Heeled will bring the reader into the world of the shoe—a fashion statement, a way to protect our feet from the dirt and dangers of the ground, and a piece of outerwear that often goes without contemplation, only drawing our attention if particularly eye-catching, or in need of replacement. The relevance of the discussion around high heels exists in an interdisciplinary plane, sitting within the realms of fashion, misogyny and female empowerment, historicity and cultural context—all of which are my research specialties—and engineering and product innovation, which will be brought in through documentary research.

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Sasha Waters Freyer

Professor, Department of Photography + Film, School of the Arts

“Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World”

I will work on editing and iterating conversations and dialogue around a feature-length documentary film in progress, Mary Oliver: Love the Mystery – a portrait of the fearless poet of the natural world, Mary Oliver (approved by her estate). The film is slated for broadcast on the national PBS series American Masters in the summer of 2026.  A writer from the age of 13, Mary Oliver was born of Transcendentalism and Romanticism inspired by Emerson, Whitman, and Shelley. She was also shaped by her experience of childhood sexual abuse – which she did not share publicly until her 70s – her queerness, and her radical self-acceptance. Yet Oliver cannot be easily fixed with labels like “ecopoet,” or “feminist,” and she was, paradoxically, a deeply spiritual poet unaffiliated with any specific religion. Mary Oliver challenges many of the traditions associated with poets of the natural world – her body of work provides quiet resistance to American individualism, sentimentalism, and ingrained taboos around illness, disability, and death. She has recently had an enormous impact on a new generation of readers, one that is especially open to healing personal and generational trauma by cultivating joy as a means of survival. It is these intergenerational questions raised by her vast body of work that I wish to think through and about in community.

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Ramin Fazeli

PhD Candidate in the Media, Art and Text Program 

“The Last Iranian Filmmaker: Cinema of Asghar Farhadi”

This project offers a philosophical exploration of the cinema of Asghar Farhadi, one of Iran’s most internationally recognized filmmakers. Moving beyond readings of his work as merely sociopolitical commentary or cultural representation, this study engages Farhadi’s films as complex cinematic events that generate new ways of thinking about ethics, temporality, and subjectivity. Drawing on Deleuzian film-philosophy, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and political theory, the project reconsiders films such as A Separation and About Elly not as depictions of Iranian society, but as affective and philosophical encounters that unsettle fixed notions of identity, law, and truth.

This interdisciplinary analysis examines how Farhadi’s use of narrative ambiguity, gendered agency, and legal entanglements reflect broader tensions between censorship, power, and cinematic creativity. Positioned at the intersection of Iranian cinema, global film theory, and philosophy, this research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to move beyond representationalist frameworks, showing how cinema itself can operate as a mode of thought and critique. The project aims to produce academic publications and inform public conversations about cinema’s role in shaping ethical and political imagination across borders.

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Mary Strawderman 

L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs

“Exploring Equity and Excellence: A Mixed Methods Study of Research Funding Disparities and Success Among Women Faculty of Color at a Research-Intensive University”

This fellowship will provide support for the second phase of an explanatory sequential mixed-methods study aimed at investigating the effects of cumulative advantage and the impact of gendered and racialized structures and processes on research funding inequality in academia through an intersectional framework. This phase involves conducting semi-structured interviews with successful individuals who belong to groups that face negative funding outcomes in order to catalog strategies and lived experiences through phenomenological inquiry.

Metainferences are drawn through the integration of the quantitative and qualitative strands, allowing a view of research funding inequalities to be contextualized by the personal narratives of successful faculty from historically underfunded groups. Information derived through this study describes factors interrelated with inequality and bias in competitive funding processes that reflect broader societal dynamics of power and privilege; analyzes elements and behaviors that underpin success; and suggests policies and procedures that address inequities within the distribution of research funding.

Previous Fellows