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The University of Colorado Boulder's Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) announces the faculty fellows for the 2025 - 2026 academic year.Ìý

The Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) at the University of Colorado Boulder is proud to announce the recipients of the prestigious CHA Faculty Fellowships for the 2025-2026 academic year. This highly competitive program, designed to support innovative and significant scholarly work, provides a two-course teaching reduction to selected faculty members, enabling them to make substantial progress on their research projects. The fellowship has a history of supporting transformative work in the arts and humanities.

The 2025-2026 cohort features scholars whose projects encompass a wide range of disciplines and subjects, highlighting the richness and scope of arts and humanities research. The selected fellows are:

1. Natalie M. Avalos, Ethnic Studies

Project:Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal
Settler colonial and decolonial theory often focuses on the material and epistemic dimension of colonial dispossession. This ethnographic study posits that settler colonialism is enabled to monopolize Native resources by monopolizing metaphysical narratives that pathologize Native land and peoples as primitive and in need of development. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with Tibetan refugees and urban Native American peoples from 2012 to 2018 in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, with a phenomenological analysis of religious life, this study demonstrates that a contemporary focus on religious continuity acts as a decolonizing force, supporting new commitments to transnational peoplehood (nationhood) in diaspora. Religious practice provides the practical tools for socio-political mobility but also acts as a spiritual salve, healing both the material and psychological effects of colonialism. Although their struggles for sovereignty are multivalent, placing Native American and Tibetan decolonization movements in conversation illustrates the way religious identity re-imagines nationhood and belonging in an increasingly globalized world.ÌýÌý

2. Emmanuel David, Women & Gender Studies

Project:Trans-American Orientalism: The Asia-Pacific Encounters of Transgender Pioneer Christine Jorgensen, 1961–1969
Drawing on multilingual sources from archives in Asia, Australia, Denmark, and the United States, David’s project explores Jorgensen’s little-known performance tour across Asia and the Pacific, especially her extended stay in the Philippines. By chronicling this understudied chapter of Jorgensen’s life, David reassesses her place in mid-twentieth-century trans history from a transpacific perspective. "Sonic Transness," an article drawn from the larger book project, appeared in 2023 in American Quarterly.Ìý

3. Hilary Kalisman, History / Program in Jewish Studies

Project:Standardized Testing: An Imperial and National Legacy of the Modern Middle East
Kalisman’s project recovers the origins and consequences of school examinations: one of the most important, durable, pervasive, and under-analyzed legacies of imperialism in the Middle East. Focusing on Britain's Middle Eastern Mandates (Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Transjordan/Jordan), Kalisman argues that standardized tests outlasted the governments that set exams in motion because they could be used both as a repressive tactic and as a promise, albeit often illusory, of social mobility. This project brings to light the politics behind standardized tests, in one of the regions of the world where testing holds the most importance.

The Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) Faculty Fellows for the 2025- 2026 academic year.

4. Isabel K. Köster, Classics

Project:Justice beyond the Courts: Divine Punishment in the Roman World
In her book project, Justice beyond the Courts: Divine Punishment in the Roman World, Köster explores how the inhabitants of the pre-Christian Roman world used appeals to divine retribution to obtain justice against those who had wronged them. By tracing the rhetoric of divine punishment across inscriptions, poetic texts, philosophical works, oratorical handbooks, and speeches, produced primarily between the first century BCE and the first century CE, Köster demonstrates that Romans from all social classes saw the gods as essential, but capricious, partners in addressing injustice who could be incentivized to help individuals negotiate a deeply unequal and unfair world.

5. Adrienne Merritt, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures

Project:A Playlist for Black Germany: Hapticity, Future Worlds, and Joy
²Ñ±ð°ù°ù¾±³Ù³Ù’s project focuses on contemporary literature, art, museum installations, and hip-hop by Black artists and writers in the German context to explore the reality of being both Black and German. Highlighting creative works from the past decade, Merritt argues that Black German artists and scholars use cultural production to open possibilities for imagining new worldviews that disrupt normalized concepts of time, space, and being while also attending to the lived reality in a world preoccupied with Black necropolitics (i.e., how governments assign differential value to human life). By forging new paths of inquiry through cultural production, Black German creators acknowledge the historical lineages and social-seismic aftermaths of racialization and colonial fantasies in Germany while also imagining and dreaming worlds where Blackness is central to the conceptualization of humanness and subjectivity. The concept of worldbuilding is connected to Black joy and hapticity to highlight Black German cultural production as a joyful celebration of Black creativity, ingenuity, and lived reality, one that seeks to build community and connection across the Black diaspora.

6. Dianne Mitchell, English

Project:Renaissance Women and the Poetics of Erotic Life
How did Englishwomen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries theorize their experiences of sex, desire, refusal, and longing? Literary studies of erotic life have long prioritized male accounts or female "voices" that are actually staged characters, performed by men and boys. But poems, letters, and other literary documents by women offer a compelling counterarchive of feeling. Mitchell’s project insists that women are best placed to unfold their own erotic lives and dives into manuscript archives to explore the language and literary resources available to them for doing so. Mitchell argues that scholarly methodologies and ways of knowing must change if women’s distinctive strategies for expressing desire or disgust are to be accorded a prominent place within histories of sexuality.

7. Dimitri Nakassis, Classics

Project:Reassembling Mycenaean Greece
Nakassis’s project proposes a new way of understanding Late Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1650–1050 BCE) by taking apart interpretations premised on its essential unity, which fail to account for much of the archaeological and textual evidence. Nakassis reconfigures the study of Mycenaean Greece by breaking it down into distinct practices whose histories can be traced temporally and spatially, and then reassembling these to produce rich, textured historical understandings.

8. Paul Sutter, History

Project:Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics
Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics is an environmental and medical history of U.S. public health efforts during the era of canal construction in Panama. The manuscript examines American perceptions of the tropics and tropical nature, how those perceptions informed U.S. sanitary and other administrative practices in Panama, and how those practices resulted in the creation of a Canal Zone landscape that mixed marked public health improvements with profound racial and medical inequalities. Sutter also argues that the environmental changes wrought by canal construction created many of the conditions conducive to malaria and yellow fever transmission, conditions that U.S. officials and observers often naturalized as tropical. The manuscript concludes by tracing the diverse legacies of this pivotal moment in the history of U.S. public health administration.

9. Anna Tsouhlarakis, Art & Art History

Reparative Faculty Fellowship to Address Settler Colonialism
Project:Indigenous Femininity
Throughout her art practice, Tsouhlarakis has continually worked to stretch concepts and understanding of Native American identity through sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance art. In her current research, Tsouhlarakis explores notions of Indigenous femininity in relation to illustrations of power and aggression while reconsidering how Indigenous female presence can be recovered from a place of obscurity within the archives of the Western canon of art. This year, Tsouhlarakis was awarded a 2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and has begun research in the archives of three Smithsonian collections, focusing on imagery and objects depicting Native American women.Ìý
For the CHA Reparative Faculty Fellowship, Tsouhlarakis will continue her research by visiting collections, historical sites, and museums in Italy and Greece that house classical artworks of women from times of antiquity. The culmination will be a new body of work derived from this research.

10. Marcia Yonemoto, History

Project:The Changing Logics of Adoption in Japan, 1600-1912
Japanese history offers a unique window onto a universal question: what is a family? For most of Japan’s past, frequent adoption—of males, females, adults, children, even married couples—played an essential role in constituting families over time. By examining the changing meanings of adoption across the early modern/modern divide (c. 1600-1912), Yonemoto’s project brings various humanities disciplines into conversation in new ways that reveal the centrality of family in an era marked by continuity as well as transformation.

The CHA Faculty Fellowships are a vital part of ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½Æƽâ°æÏÂÔØ commitment to fostering groundbreaking research and providing faculty with the support needed to continue their scholarly work. The fellows for the 2025-2026 academic year are anticipated to make significant contributions to their respective fields and engage with their peers by sharing their progress. The CHA is excited to support these scholars as they advance knowledge and creativity in the humanities and the arts.