Featured Research: Landscapes, Physical and Metaphorical
This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects explore how we relate to nature and how those relationships, in turn, shape how we think about ourselves.
Featured Research
Fellows at the National Humanities Center explore an astonishingly diverse array of topics, touching on people, events, and ideas across time and geography.
Below you'll find Fellows sharing a little about how they were inspired to pursue the subjects they study, insights they've gained through their research, and how their work contributes to their disciplines and to our understanding of the human experience.
Featured Research: Balancing the Scales
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the pursuit of justice, both criminal and social, in a variety of contexts and through diverse means—governmental investigations, courts, artistic protest, and the development of communities united by shared experiences of discrimination.
Featured Research: Changing Perspectives
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects reexamine historical actors, events, and eras by shifting the perspectives through which they’ve previously been viewed. They encourage us to assume a different point of view and to consider previously unnoticed aspects revealed about the lives of their subjects.
Featured Research: Life in a Data-Driven, Technology-Mediated World
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects explore how computing has reshaped thinking around everything from political power to literary study and how the promises and perils of technological advances are best measured through a humanistic lens.
Featured Research: City, Town, Village
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects explore the human experience through the lens of settled spaces, revealing new insights about the importance of place in understanding the human experience.
Featured Research: Affect, Perception, and Reality
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the ways that lived experience is colored, configured, and interpreted. These scholars are exploring the ways that thought, feeling, and custom produce subjective lenses through which we encounter the world and extract meaning.
Featured Research: Addressing Legacies of Injustice and the Effects of Bondage
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects look at the immediate and extended social effects of incarceration, resistance in the midst of captivity, and efforts to confront persistent legacies of injustice that resonate to the present day.
Featured Research: Responding to a Changing World
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the ways that humans and environments act upon one another, challenging people physically, culturally, and ethically to commune, negotiate, innovate, and adapt.
Featured Research: Music and Its Uses
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the role that music plays in shaping lives. From churches in medieval Iberia to movie houses in the Soviet bloc to the streets and dancehalls of New Orleans and Nigeria, these scholars are examining music’s profound power to reveal and reimagine the world around us.
Featured Research: Female Authorship
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects focus on the voices of women, from medieval hagiographers to contemporary rappers, exploring the ways that an author’s gender influences her perspective—across genres, eras, and geographies.