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# National Humanities Center: The National Humanities Center is a national resource devoted to advancing significant humanistic study.

## Sitemaps
[XML Sitemap](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/sitemap_index.xml): Includes all crawlable and indexable pages.

## Posts
- [Embracing Curiosity and Inspiring Courage](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/embracing-curiosity-inspiring-courage/): Kathleen DuVal (NHC Fellow, 2008–09; 2025–26) shares insights from her acclaimed book “Native Nations” with NHC President and Director Blair LM Kelley.
- [Ben Vinson III Re-Appointed as NHC Presidential Scholar-in-Residence](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ben-vinson-reappointed-presidential-scholar/): Dr. Ben Vinson III has been re-appointed as a 2026–27 Presidential Scholar-in-Residence at the National Humanities Center.
- [Representation and Resistance](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/representation-resistance/): Complicated dimensions of political affiliation, organization, and resistance are created from intersections of ideology, imagination, and commitment.
- [National Humanities Center Announces 2026 Scholarly Writing Institute Participants](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-2026-scholarly-writing-institute-participants/): Twenty scholars from sixteen universities and colleges will be in residence at the NHC for a nine-day intensive writing and research program in early July.
- [National Humanities Center Unveils New Website and Visual Identity ](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-new-website-visual-identity/): The enhanced presence highlights the Center's continuing evolution as a dynamic hub of critical thought, active collaboration, and accessible scholarship.
- [Humanities and the Natural World](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-natural-world/): Complex relationships between humans and the natural world are revealed in depictions of fauna and flora.
- [National Humanities Center Announces Lineup for 2026 Being Human Festival (US)](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-announces-lineup-2026-being-human-festival-us/): Events to be Held in Communities Across the US April 17–May 3, 2026
- [National Humanities Center Announces 2026–27 Fellows](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-announces-2026-27-fellows/): Twenty-nine leading scholars will come to the Center from universities and colleges in fifteen US states, the District of Columbia, and Ghana.
- [National Humanities Center Announces 2026 Class of Select Summer Residents](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-announces-2026-summer-residents/): These 40 humanists represent a variety of public research institutions, private universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and liberal arts colleges.
- [Humanities in the Age of Change](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-the-age-of-change/): On March 19, 2026, the National Humanities Center held a celebration in honor of Blair LM Kelley’s installation as the seventh president and director of the Center.
- [Suffering, Narrative, and the Public Sphere](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/suffering-narrative-public-sphere/): The ways we characterize and tell stories about human rights and public policy issues affect what we think about them.
- [Between the Medium and the Message](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/between-medium-and-message/): Media technologies—printing, typography, and sonic archives—have always been harnessed and adapted to reflect distinctive identities and preserve cultural elements.
- [National Humanities Center Names Leah Wu Fell Vice President for Development](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-leah-wu-fell-vice-president-development/): Fell recently served as chief development officer at PBS North Carolina, and in senior fundraising roles at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences and the Denver Art Museum.
- [Kathleen DuVal and Blair LM Kelley Discuss “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America”](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/kathleen-duval-blair-kelley-discuss-native-nations/): Kathleen DuVal chronicles a thousand years of Indigenous history in North America and reframes centuries of Native American agency.
- [Ben Vinson III Appointed as Inaugural Presidential Scholar in Residence](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ben-vinson-presidential-scholar-in-residence/): The Presidential Scholar in Residence initiative invites distinguished humanities leaders to participate in the robust intellectual life of the Center.
- [National Humanities Center Names 2025–26 Teacher Advisory Council](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-2025-26-teacher-advisory-council/): Teachers from schools in twelve states will work with the Center’s staff to pilot, evaluate, and promote resources and programs for collegiate and pre-collegiate educators.
- [Business Leader, Educator, and Creator James Rhee Elected to Board of the National Humanities Center](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/james-rhee-elected-nhc-board/): James Rhee articulates a philosophy that makes tangible the critical roles of trust, dignity, and systems thinking in designing and fostering thriving organizations.
- [Statement in Support of the Smithsonian Institution](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/smithsonian-institution/): The National Humanities Center stands firmly in support of the Smithsonian Institution, its administration, and its museum professionals.
- [National Humanities Center Announces Blair LM Kelley as New President and Director](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-announces-blair-kelley-new-president/): After a nationwide search, the National Humanities Center is pleased to announce the selection of historian Blair LM Kelley as its next president and director.

## Pages
- [Reading Nature’s Poetry](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/reading-natures-poetry/): —John Opie (NHC Fellow, 1980–81)
- [Hitting All the Right Notes](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhlc-trisha-santanam/): Trisha SantanamEmerging Scholar, Duke UniversityNational Humanities Leadership Council Member
- [Being “That” Teacher](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tac-claudine-james/): Claudine JamesSeventh-Grade English Teacher, Malvern, ArkansasNHC Teacher Advisory Council Member
- [Fellows and Their Work](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellows-works/): The National Humanities Center is one of the world’s leading institutes for advanced study, fostering deep insights into the stories, history, and ideas that shape our lives. The remarkable work of NHC Fellows has pushed the boundaries of academic fields, sparked vital cultural conversations, and enriched the public's understanding of the human experience.
- [Resource Directory](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/resources-directory/)
- [Former Fellows](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/former-fellows/)
- [Digital Collections](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/digital-collections/): The Center’s searchable collections of digital materials include recordings, teaching resources, and curated archives from past NHC initiatives. They offer ready access to nearly 50 years of humanities scholarship—with new materials and collections being added continually.
- [Current Fellows](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/current-fellows/): Home
- [Scholars at Work Webinars](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/scholars-at-work-webinars/): Through its partnership with institutional sponsors, the National Humanities Center delivers a variety of opportunities for humanities faculty and students to grow professionally and personally, sharpen their skills, and connect with others who share their passion for exploring the depths of human experience.
- [Public Engagement Programs](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/public-engagement/): NHC public engagement programs connect a wide range of audiences with humanities research, promoting the importance of the humanities in all our lives and communities.
- [Featured Research Archives](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/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.Learn how they were inspired to pursue their subjects, the insights they've gained, and how their work contributes to our understanding of the human experience.
- [NHC Residential Fellowship Core Values](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-fellowships-core-values/): Our warm and inviting community is comprised of a diverse staff and a vibrant cohort of scholars who share a rich history of meaningful contributions to human knowledge.
- [Education Programs](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/): NHC education programs build bridges between the academic world and the working classroom, addressing both classic and contemporary aspects of the humanities.
- [An Unconventional But Distinctly Human Path](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhlc-pablo-avila/): Pablo ÁvilaEmerging Scholar, University of MemphisNational Humanities Leadership Council Member
- [Lighting the Flame](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tac-matt-hicks/): Matt HicksHigh School English Language Arts TeacherNHC Teacher Advisory Council Member
- [Research Fellowships & Programs](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/research-fellowships-programs/): Conceived with the needs of humanists in mind, the National Humanities Center provides scholars with an environment and resources conducive to generating new knowledge and understanding of the human experience.
- [Teacher Advisory Council](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/teacher-advisory-council/): Education Programs at the National Humanities Center work to provide leadership, training, resources, and partnerships that advance humanities education at the K–16 level.
- [Mission & Impact](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/mission-and-impact/): The National Humanities Center advances scholarship, education, and public engagement in the humanities. Through fellowships, teaching initiatives, and public programs, the Center deepens understanding of the human experience and the ideas that shape our world.
- [Webinars](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/webinars/): Virtual sessions and learning experiences for educators and scholars to sharpen their professional skills.
- [Humanities in Class Webinars](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/humanities-in-class-webinars/): Details and registration for the 2026–27 season will be available in early August. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed.
- [News](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/news/)
- [Upcoming Events](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/events/): Virtual sessions and learning experiences for educators and scholars to sharpen their professional skills.
- [National Humanities Leadership Council](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/national-humanities-leadership-council/): Preparing our nation’s next generation of leaders to face the challenges of the twenty-first century is an imperative shared by educators at every level. This is especially true at colleges and universities where students not only look to pursue a liberal education but also to discover their passions and hone skills for future careers.
- [Small Grants](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/small-grants/): Financial support for innovative research and humanistic projects.
- [Workshops and Institutes](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/workshops-institutes/): Collaborative professional development programs designed for K–16 educators and humanities scholars.
- [Teaching Resources](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/teaching-resources/): Primary source collections, lesson plans, and webinars for classroom educators.
- [Leadership](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/leadership/): Empowering teacher leaders and the next generation through professional development programming and mentorship.
- [Teaching the Digital Diaspora](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/teaching-the-digital-diaspora/): Education Programs
- [Staff of the National Humanities Center](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/staff/): President and Director
- [Blair LM Kelley, President and Director](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/president-and-director/): At a time of challenge and transition for the humanities, the purpose for this institution is clear.
- [Connecting Research and Learning Across Disciplines](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/connecting-research-and-learning-across-disciplines/): Education Programs
- [Scholarly Writing Institute](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/scholarly-writing-institute/): July 2–10, 2026 at the National Humanities Center
- [2026 Being Human Festival (US)](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/being-human-festival-us-2026/): April 17–May 3, 2026
- [Our Privacy Policy](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/privacy-policy-new/): The National Humanities Center is an independent, nonprofit center for advanced study dedicated to supporting humanities research, teaching, and public understanding. Our website address is https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org.
- [Our Core Values](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/core-values/): Our warm and inviting community is comprised of a diverse staff and a vibrant cohort of scholars who share a rich history of meaningful contributions to human knowledge. We collectively foster a culture that is empowering, responsible, intentional, collaborative, and curious.
- [Sponsors of the National Humanities Center](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/sponsors/): In addition to the generosity of individual donors, the Center is grateful for support from private and public foundations, corporate philanthropy, and institutional sponsors—universities and academic organizations whose partnership specifically supports the Center’s fellowship program and public outreach efforts.
- [Summer Residents of the National Humanities Center, 2018–2026](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/previous-summer-residents/): Susanneh Bieber, Texas A&M UniversityEcologies of Air: Inflatable Art and Architecture
- [Responsible AI Project](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/responsible-ai-project/): In 2021, the NHC began a partnership with Google to reimagine the training needed to live and work ethically and responsibly with AI technologies. This resulted in mentorship provided to university faculty across the country as they develop curriculum from a humanities perspective on responsible AI. We hosted 23 university faculty from 15 institutions in building courses that introduce methodologies developed in humanities disciplines to students on the topic of responsible AI.
- [Principles on Copyright, Fair Use, and Open Licensing](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/principles-on-copyright-fair-use-open-licensing/): The National Humanities Center (NHC) is committed to broadening access to humanities scholarship. NHC resources are intended for wide use and reuse by educators, journalists, and researchers. Unless otherwise marked, NHC original resources are licensed CC BY 4.0 whenever possible, and include other inserts that are CC-licensed, in the public domain, or permitted by fair use.
- [Telling Untold Stories and Revealing Unvarnished Truths](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/telling-untold-stories-revealing-unvarnished-truths/): The Center has also been dedicated to ensuring that this groundbreaking scholarship is widely available for use in America’s classrooms. With input from its scholarly community, the NHC has created and maintains extensive collections of materials to support the teaching of African American studies to collegiate and pre-collegiate students. These resources are among the most heavily used tools the Center offers to teachers, receiving over 150,000 visits last year alone.
- [Residential Fellowships](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/residential-fellowships/): The National Humanities Center’s Residential Fellowship is one of the most prestigious humanities fellowship programs in the world. Fellows enjoy a beautiful and serene space to write, unparalleled library and reference support, excellent dining services, and a stimulating and supportive intellectual community.
- [Previous Teacher Advisory Councils](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/previous-tac-members/): The National Humanities Center's Teacher Advisory Council supports Education programs at the Center for a one-year term of service. Chosen to represent multiple disciplines in the humanities, these teacher leaders accept an active role in the development, evaluation, and promotion of the Center’s educational materials and projects.
- [National Humanities Center Institutional Sponsorship Program](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/institutional-sponsorships/): The National Humanities Center’s Institutional Sponsorship Program was initiated as a way to strengthen ties with colleges, universities, and other organizations that share the Center’s commitment to supporting the highest caliber of humanities research.
- [Flora Scroop-Reid Childcare Bursary](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/flora-scroop-reid-childcare-bursary/): The Flora Scroop-Reid Childcare Bursary Fund is designed to support NHC residential Fellows by offsetting a portion of preschool childcare during the fellowship year.
- [National Humanities Center Leadership](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/nhc-leadership/): About Us
- [Careers at the National Humanities Center](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/careers/): We're looking for amazing and talented humanists. Join our team!
- [Homepage](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/): The National Humanities Center is a private, nonprofit organization, and the only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in all areas of the humanities.
- [Become a Friend of the Center](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/become-a-friend/): Join our mailing list to stay up-to-date about the National Humanities Center and the humanities.

## Fellows
- [Mario Juan Valdés Navia](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2023-24/mario-juan-valdes-navia/): Mario Juan Valdés Navia is a historian, professor and researcher, essayist and web editor specialized in Cuban history, culture and current affairs. He’s worked in higher education, both undergraduate and graduate, in the disciplines of history of Cuba and America, Latin American thought, teaching methodology, and historical and socio-cultural research. He obtained a PhD in Pedagogical Sciences with the thesis: “Integrative strategy of José Martí’s historical thought to the assimilation of historical content in Basic Secondary School” (2003). His research ventures into the history of Cuba and the Sancti Spiritus region, José Martí’s thought, didactics of history, cultural studies and civil society. He has published four books and participated in six others, as well as numerous articles in scientific publications, academic websites and political analysis platforms.
- [Nobuko Senoo](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/nobuko-senoo/): Nobuko Senoo received her MA in Comparative Studies of Culture from the Graduate School of Comparative Culture at Kyoritsu Women’s University (Japan) in 2001. Her master’s thesis is entitled Kohei keishiki no Chuugoku ryuunyuu to sono hensen: Houryouji kennou houmotsu Ryuushu suibyou no keifu (The transmission into China and evolution of Persian-styled ewers: The genealogy of the dragon-headed water pot that the Houryouji Monastery presented to the emperor as a treasure). Her bachelor’s thesis at Keio University (1998) is entitled Chugoku Shutsudo no Higashi Ro-ma Kinka (The gold coins of Eastern Rome excavated in China). She also studied at Luoyang University and Peking University in China in 1991–93 and has good proficiency in Chinese. She worked as a museum staff member at Okayama Orient Museum from 2002–05 and 2010–11. She was appointed by Asahi Shimbunsha Newspaper Office, Tokyo, as a researcher of the Annual Dunhuang Research Fellows Dispatch System to conduct onsite researches on Dunhuang frescos in China in 2001. She also participated in many onsite archaeological excavations and field work in China from 1995–2001.
- [Cotten Seiler](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/cotten-seiler/): Cotten Seiler, professor of American studies at Dickinson College, is a cultural historian interested in racialization, infrastructure, and political economy. He is the author of the books White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure (University of Chicago Press, 2026) and Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and numerous articles, and editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. He resides in Baltimore with his wife Claire and their two dogs Cecil and Cassius.
- [Jonathan Sarris](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/jonathan-sarris/): Jonathan Sarris has taught US history at North Carolina Wesleyan University in Rocky Mount, North Carolina since 2004. He holds a PhD and MA in history from the University of Georgia, and a BA in history from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
- [Dan Cohen](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/dan-cohen/): Dan Cohen’s research explores the intersection of religious studies and neuroscience. He is fascinated by the way that different religious traditions have developed a variety of ritual practices (e.g., prayer, meditation) to facilitate spiritually transcendent experiences. Through ongoing collaborative and interdisciplinary research on the religious and spiritual orientations of individuals with different forms of brain injury, Cohen’s research aims to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between religious (and secular) experiences of transcendence involving the temporary loss of one’s “sense of self” and related neurological processes, in order to develop a better understanding of the development of religion in humanity.
- [Karin L. Zipf](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/karin-l-zipf/): Karin Zipf is a professor of history at East Carolina University, where she has taught courses on American history, history of the US South, and history of gender, sexuality and US women for 25 years. Her research concentrates on labor, gender, sexuality, incarceration, eugenics, agriculture, and human trafficking in the American South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- [Jerry C. Zee](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/jerry-c-zee/): Jerry Zee is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. His work speaks to contemporary questions of environmental politics, planetary change, and geopolitical experiment across East Asia and the Pacific.
- [Terrion L. Williamson](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/terrion-l-williamson/): Terrion L. Williamson is an associate professor of Black studies and Gender and Women’s studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she also serves as the founding director of the Black Midwest Initiative. She is the author of Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life and the editor of Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest. She is also coeditor, with Delia Fernández-Jones, of the University of Nebraska book series Reimagining Race and Region in the American Midwest.
- [Ronald Williams II](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/ronald-williams-ii/): Ronald Williams II is an independent scholar and writer with broad interests in African American and African Diaspora history and politics and the history of US foreign relations. He was previously a member of the full-time faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he taught courses in history, politics, and public policy in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies.
- [Carina Venter](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/carina-venter/): Carina Venter is an interdisciplinary researcher grounded in the humanities, a writer, and a consultant. She is a senior lecturer in musicology at Stellenbosch University and chair of the South African Society for Research in Music. She holds a doctorate in musicology from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MBA from Stellenbosch Business School. Her work brings together cultural history and critical theory, with particular emphasis on music and violence, apartheid histories and aesthetics, critical disability studies, and inclusive innovation.
- [Emine Hande Tuna](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/emine-hande-tuna/): Emine Hande Tuna is a philosopher who spends her time thinking seriously about things that don’t exist—like square circles, guilt-free villains, and moral worlds where injustice counts as good. She’s an assistant professor of philosophy at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she writes and teaches about imagination, aesthetics, and why some stories just won’t sit right with us. Her first book, Kantian Art Criticism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and her work has appeared in journals including The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Analysis, and the European Journal of Philosophy. She is also the recipient of the John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics.
- [Sarra Tlili](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/sarra-tlili/): Sarra Tlili is an associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Florida in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Her main areas of research are animal and environmental ethics in Islam, Qur’anic stylistics, and tradition and modernity in Arabic literature. Her publications include Animals in the Qur’an (Cambridge University Press, 2012), “All Animals Are Equal, or Are They? The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Animal Epistle and its Unhappy End,” and “From Breath to Soul: The Quranic Word Rūḥ and Its (Mis)interpretations.”
- [Benjamin Sommer](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/benjamin-sommer/): Benjamin D. Sommer is a professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Previously he was the director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, where he taught from 1994–2008. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Hebrew University, the Shalom Hartman Institute, the University of Chicago, and Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University, and a fellow of the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization at the New York University Law School, the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, the Yad Hanadiv Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. 
- [Claire Seiler](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/claire-seiler/): Claire Seiler is professor of English at Dickinson College. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary English, Irish, and US literatures; the health humanities; poetry and poetics; and disability studies. Her current book project, The Narrative Lives of Polio, recovers the literary history of poliomyelitis from a dangerous vaccine oblivion. The book begins in the 1880s, when polio shifted from endemic presence to epidemic threat, and ends around 1965, a decade after the arrival of the first vaccines. An essay drawn from the book’s final chapter was recently published in PMLA.
- [Charles Samuelson](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/charles-samuelson/): Charles Samuelson (BA Amherst College; PhD Princeton University) is a specialist of medieval French literature and culture. His research uses close textual analysis and looks to both medieval learned culture and modern theory to take to task entrenched notions about the gender and sexual politics of medieval texts. His monograph, Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2022), considers in tandem two genres of verse narratives that have not previously been studied together: verse romances, best known for Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century Arthurian fictions; and dits, associated with Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century narrative poetry. It makes the case for important continuities between these two genres both characterized by their extreme literary self-consciousness and studies how literary play and experimentation bleed, in these texts always about love, into issues of gender and sexual politics. Resisting the notion that medieval texts about “courtly love” are either (proto-)heteronormative or just unrelated to modern heteronormativity, as well as the tendency always to situate queerness at margins, this book explores how one facet of their “courtliness”—namely, their sophistication, as valued by medieval courts—maps in disruptive, even queer, ways onto influential modern conceptions of queerness.
- [Travis W. Proctor](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/travis-w-proctor/): Travis Proctor is an associate professor of religion at Wittenberg University (Ohio). He received his PhD in Ancient Mediterranean Religions from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He specializes in religions of the ancient Mediterranean, with a focus on the histories of Christian cultures in the ancient world (ca. 50–300 CE). His research draws on perspectives from cultural studies, gender studies, and the environmental humanities to demonstrate how the histories of religious cultures have continuing significance for society today.
- [Young Kyun Oh](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/young-kyun-oh/): Young Kyun Oh is an associate professor of Chinese and Sino-Korean at the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. His research interests include the connected histories of East Asian languages and of Sinitic books. He was trained in East Asian philosophy, historical phonology of Chinese and Sino-Korean, and Literary Sinitic. He expanded his research to the history of East Asian books, exploring ways to place the premise and adaptation of Korean culture in the Sinophonic and Sinographic sphere. He is the author of Engraving Virtue: The Print History of the Premodern Korean Moral Primer (Brill, 2013), in which he delved into the cultural significance of woodblock printing in Sinitic societies, and articles on the book history, linguistic history, and literature of premodern Korea and East Asia.
- [Ghassan Moazzin](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/ghassan-moazzin/): Ghassan Moazzin is an assistant professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and in the Department of History. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he received both his BA (2012) and PhD (2017). Before coming to Hong Kong, he was a JSPS International Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Economics of the University of Tokyo. He has also been a visiting scholar at East China Normal University in Shanghai and the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica in Taipei. His doctoral dissertation won both the Coleman Prize of the Association of Business Historians and the Herman E. Krooss Prize of the Business History Conference. It was also a finalist for the Dissertation Prize (Category: The Long Nineteenth Century) of the World Economic History Congress 2018.
- [Patrick McKelvey](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/patrick-mckelvey/): Patrick McKelvey (PhD, Brown University) is an associate professor of film, television, and theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He researches the cultural, social, and theatrical history of disability in the twentieth-century United States. His first book, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation (New York University Press, 2024) received the Working-Class Studies Association’s CLR James Award and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award (Music and the Performing Arts Category). His other writings appear in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. With the support of a 2025–26 National Humanities Center fellowship, McKelvey is writing a second book, Supporting Actors: A Disability History of Theatrical Welfare.
- [Mireya Loza](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/mireya-loza/): Mireya Loza is an associate professor in the Department of History and the American Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her areas of research include Latinx history, social movements, labor history, and food studies. Her first book, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom (The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), examines the Bracero Program and how guest workers negotiated the intricacies of indigeneity, intimacy, and transnational organizing. Defiant Braceros was awarded the Theodore Saloutos Book Prize by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. In addition to her research and publications, she also serves as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
- [Chong-Fuk Lau](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/chong-fuk-lau/): Professor Lau received his BEng in information engineering and MPhil in philosophy from the Chinese University of Hong Kong followed by a PhD in philosophy from Heidelberg University in Germany. After a brief teaching stint in Germany, supported by a Humboldt Fellowship, he joined the Department of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Throughout his career, he has held visiting positions at prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Free University of Berlin, Harvard University, Columbia University, Kyoto University, and Oxford University, supported by competitive fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Fulbright Program, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC).
- [Michelle Lynn Kahn](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/michelle-lynn-kahn/): Michelle Lynn Kahn is an associate professor of modern European history at the University of Richmond. She is a scholar of the global and transnational history of Germany after 1945, with expertise in far-right extremism, migration, racism, gender, and sexuality. She currently researches the transnational far-right and is writing a book tentatively titled Neo-Nazis in Germany and the United States: An Entangled History of Hate, 1945–2000. This book investigates the deep, dark web of transatlantic connections between German and American neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and white supremacists from the end of World War II in 1945 through the rise of the internet era in the 1990s. Relatedly, Kahn is tracing German neo-Nazis’ connections to far-right extremists across the globe (including in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa), as well as investigating the history of queer fascism and homosexuality within far-right movements.
- [CJ Jones](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/cj-jones/): CJ Jones holds an appointment as a professor of German studies at the University of Notre Dame, where they will assume the role of the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute after their fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Their interdisciplinary research draws together history, literature, music, liturgy, and manuscript studies to explore how medieval religious women negotiated gendered and religious structures of authority and how liturgical practice afforded flexible opportunities for creating and performing communal identity.
- [Grace Elizabeth Hale](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2002-03/grace-elizabeth-hale/): Grace Elizabeth Hale writes about the history of twentieth-century America and the regional culture of the South for both academic and general audiences. Her most recent research has focused on uncovering untold and forgotten stories of the rural and small-town South. She is the author of In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning; Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture; A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America; and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. Her essays and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and CNN, and she writes regularly about photography and other forms of visual art for museum catalogs and photo books and in her series Shutter, published by Southern Cultures.
- [Ruiying Gao](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/ruiying-gao/): Ruiying Gao teaches East Asian art at Wake Forest University. Her research fields include the intersections of natural history and the pictorial arts, book culture, and the work of women artists. Her current project examines the social history of materia medica images in China during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). 
- [Jiren Feng](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/jiren-feng/): Jiren Feng is a professor of Chinese studies at University of Hawai’i at Hilo. As a scholar of Chinese art and architectural history, he received academic trainings both in China and in the West. He holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from Brown University, three master’s degrees—an MA in History of Art and Architecture from Brown University, an MA in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an ME in Architectural History and Theory—and a BE in Architecture from Tsinghua University. He was also a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. His teaching career has spanned four continents, including Peking University, Brown University, Technical University of Berlin, Victoria University of Wellington, Okayama University, and University of Hawai’i. 
- [Adam Ewing](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/adam-ewing/): Adam Ewing studies the global history of Black liberation politics in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the politics of Black nationalism, pan-Africanism, and anti-colonialism. His first book, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics, examines the spread of Garveyism, the anti-colonial movement spearheaded by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, and explores the movement’s success as an incubator of Black community politics in the United States, Malawi, Zambia, and Kenya. The Age of Garvey was the recipient of the 2015 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).
- [Asa Eger](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/asa-eger/): Asa Eger is a professor of the Islamic world in the Department of History and the Program in Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). He received his PhD in 2008 from the University of Chicago in Islamic Archaeology with a specialization in the early Islamic period. Dr. Eger has been teaching at UNCG since 2009. In 2011–12, he was a fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and a fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in Byzantine Studies. From 2016–17, he was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Since 1996 he has been conducting surveys and excavations in Anatolia and Syria-Palestine (the Levant) from the Byzantine period through the Late Islamic period. He focuses on frontiers, landscape archaeology, and environmental history, as well as urbanism and the relationship between cities and their hinterlands. He also specializes in ceramic material culture. He has conducted surveys and excavations in Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus and currently is codirector of the Caesarea Coastal Archaeological Project in Israel since 2022.
- [Kathleen DuVal](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2008-09/kathleen-duval/): Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her field of expertise is early American history, particularly interactions among Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. Her books include Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.
- [Tressie McMillan Cottom](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/tressie-mcmillan-cottom/): Tressie McMillan Cottom is a professor and principal investigator with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a New York Times opinion columnist, and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Recent accolades include being named the 2023 winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize by Brandeis University for her “critical perspective and analysis to some of the greatest social challenges we face today,” the 2025 Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a 2025–26 National Humanities Center Fellow. Her most recent book, Thick: And Other Essays, was just listed as one the 30 best nonfiction books of the last 30 years by the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Two books are forthcoming with Random House Books.
- [Signe Cohen](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/signe-cohen/): Signe Cohen is a scholar of Hinduism and South Asian Buddhism. Her research focuses on classical Indian texts and their linguistic, philosophical, and cultural contexts. She has published widely on topics ranging from ancient Indian automata to the intersections of religion and popular culture, including a comparison of Siri with ancient oracles, and examinations of religious themes in the Harry Potter series.
- [Jasmine Nichole Cobb](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/jasmine-nichole-cobb/): Jasmine Nichole Cobb is a visual and cultural historian, writing nonfiction about Black women’s freedom. She is the Earl D. McLean Jr. Professor of African & African American Studies with a joint appointment in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. At the National Humanities Center she will work on The Pictorial Life of Harriet Tubman, a book that explores the visual history of the abolitionist, as well as a creative nonfiction work on single women and travel.
- [Cara Caddoo](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/cara-caddoo/): Cara Caddoo is associate professor of history and of cinema and media studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, with a particular emphasis on the intersections of culture and politics. Her recent work focuses on the experiences of Native Americans and African Americans, examining how film and other emerging media served as tools of cultural expression, resilience, and economic self-determination. Her first book, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Harvard University Press), was a Huffington Post “Best Film Book” selection, a Slate “Great Books You Should’ve Heard About” choice, a recipient of the 2015 biennial Vincent P. De Santis Prize for the best book on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and a finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Prize. She is currently completing a book that explores the formative role of modern cinema in Native American life during the Allotment era.
- [Alejandra Bronfman](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/alejandra-bronfman/): Alejandra Bronfman is a historian of media and the Caribbean with particular interests in networks of knowledge production, cultural practices, and imperial legacies. Her first book, Measures of Equality: Race, Citizenship and Social Science in Cuba, 1902–1940 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2004) examined the relationship between race, social science, and black activism in early twentieth-century Cuba. A regional and entangled understanding of the Caribbean framed two subsequent monographs, On the Move: The Caribbean Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2007), and Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (The University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Her current interest in sound and media grew out of the recognition of their simultaneous centrality and invisibility in Caribbean historiography. 
- [Alison L. Beringer](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/alison-l-beringer/): Alison L. Beringer is an associate professor of classics and humanities at Montclair State University. Trained as a German medievalist (PhD, Princeton University), and with an undergraduate degree in classics and comparative literature, Beringer pursues research in the Nachleben of antiquity in medieval and early modern Germany. She is particularly interested in the interactions between the visual and the verbal—ranging from relationships between illuminations and texts in medieval manuscripts to literary narratives about visual artifacts, both aspects that underlie her book The Sight of Semiramis: Late Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Babylonian Queen (Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016).
- [Candace Bailey](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2019-20/candace-bailey/): Candace Bailey is the Neville Distinguished Professor of the Visual and Performing Arts at North Carolina Central University. She has published widely on seventeenth-century English music, women and music in the nineteenth-century US South, and is completing a book on Edmond Dédé’s opera Morgiane (Bordeaux, 1887) to be published with Cambridge University Press. Her 2021 monograph Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South (completed at the National Humanities Center) won an Academic Choice Award and an NEH Fellows Open Book Award. She has also just completed an NEH Humanities Collections and Research Resources Grant with colleagues at the University of North Texas that concerns the collection, sharing, and mapping of metadata for women’s music materials in the nineteenth-century US.
- [Christy Anderson](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/fellow/2025-26/christy-anderson/): Christy Anderson is a historian of architecture whose work bridges early modern Europe, global maritime history, and contemporary design. A professor in the Department of Art History and member of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, she is particularly interested in how architectural knowledge moves across cultures, materials, and environments. Her current book project explores the ship as an architectural type—examining how mobile spaces at sea have shaped cities, labor, and natural landscapes across the Atlantic world.

## Events
- [2026 TeachRock Teachers Summit](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/institute/teachrock-teachers-summit-2026/): A residential summer institute exploring how music can serve as a powerful primary source for historical inquiry and civic learning.
- [Urban Ecology Arts Exchange](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/urban-ecology-arts-exchange/): Joshua Moses, Haverford College
- [An Object of Seduction: Chinese Silk in the Early Modern Trans-Pacific Trade](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/an-object-of-seduction-chinese-silk-in-the-early-modern-trans-pacific-trade/): Xiaolin Duan (NHC Fellow, 2023–24), North Carolina State University
- [Impact of the Haitian Revolution on Early American Print Culture](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/impact-of-the-haitian-revolution-on-early-american-print-culture/): Duncan Faherty, Queens College, CUNY
- [Octavia Butler Now! Reading Race, Gender, and Critical Futures](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/octavia-butler-reading-race/): R. Scott Heath, University of Pittsburgh
- [Gender, Sugar, and the Afterlives of Abolition: Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/gender-sugar-afterlives-of-abolition/): Patricia A. Matthew (NHC Fellow, 2022–23), Montclair State University
- [Holocaust Education: Resources and Approaches](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/holocaust-education/): Gretchen Skidmore, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- [Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/undisciplining-victorian-classroom/): Sophia Hsu, Lehman College
- [Indigenous Epistemologies and Literature](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/indigenous-epistemologies-literature/): Dezi Lynn, National Indian Education Association
- [Sports History, Culture Identity, and Globalism](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/sports-history-culture-identity-globalism/): Brian Sheehy (NHC Teacher Advisory Council, 2020–21), North Andover High School, North Andover, MA
- [Risking Imagination: Cultivating Hope in Education](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/risking-imagination-cultivating-hope-education/): Sarah Hardman, Columbia University Teachers College
- [Critical AI Literacy and the Humanities](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/critical-ai-literacy-humanities/): Kathryn Conrad and Sean Kamperman, University of Kansas
- [Supporting Faculty Fellowship Applications](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/supporting-faculty-fellowship-applications/): Join us for a panel discussion with leaders from two campuses with strong track records of receiving NHC fellowships.
- [The Neuro-Inclusion Revolution](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/neuro-inclusion-revolution/): Theresa Haskins, The University of Akron; University of Southern California
- [The Pictorial Life of Harriet Tubman](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/pictorial-harriet-tubman-cobb/): Jasmine Nichole Cobb (NHC Fellow, 2025–26), Duke University
- [The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/instability-of-truth-lemov/): Rebecca Lemov, Harvard University
- [Becoming a National Humanities Center Fellow](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/becoming-nhc-fellow/): Martha M. F. Kelly, vice president for scholarly programs at the National Humanities Center, will discuss the kinds of support and community scholars enjoy as residential Fellows at the Center.
- [Need to Know: Conversations About Stories That Matter](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/public-event/need-to-know-darkology/): Join award-winning Fellows from the National Humanities Center and the Stanford Humanities Center as they talk about their books and the urgent stories behind them.
- [The Narrative Lives of Polio](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/narrative-lives-of-polio/): Claire Seiler (NHC Fellow, 2025–26), Dickinson College
- [Introduction to Zotero](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/introduction-to-zotero/): Join Joe Milillo, head of the Center’s library staff, for a presentation on Zotero, a free, open source tool that allows users to collect and manage sources, write citations, and generate bibliographies.
- [Refugee Ecologies: Exploring Forced Displacement, the Environment, and American Literature](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/refugee-ecologies-exploring-forced-displacement-the-environment-and-american-literature/): This webinar suggests that refugee literature is a significant but overlooked through line in American culture, and it considers how activities such as creative-critical exercises and service-learning components can help us incorporate this thread in university courses.
- [Translation, Migration, and Language Justice](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/translation-migration-and-language-justice/): The United States has always been a country of many languages, and our public sphere is enriched by the contributions of immigrants and heritage language learners, particularly when multilingual language use is supported.
- [Joyful Learning: Supporting All Students in the Inclusive Classroom](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/joyful-learning-supporting-all-students-in-the-inclusive-classroom/): Do surprises help students learn? Can movement inspire creativity? Could exercise be used as a positive behavior support? These questions and others about collaborative learning, inclusive education, and design practices will be addressed in this webinar on creating engaging and active classrooms.
- [“The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told”: Native America, the Supreme Court, and the US Constitution](https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/event/webinars/the-worst-trickster-story-ever-told-native-america-the-supreme-court-and-the-us-constitution/): Using the “trickster” story as a lens of analysis, this webinar will explore how plenary power became constitutional.