10 Jul Spring 2025 IHC Award Winners
July 21, 2025
The IHC is pleased to announce the winners of the annual IHC Dissertation Fellowship competition. Fellows are awarded $7,000 to support interdisciplinary research in the 2025–26 year and will participate in a Fall 2025 convening of the multicampus UC Humanities Graduate Fellows Collaborative. Congratulations to these graduate students!
James Altman, Global Studies: “Solving the ‘National Question’: The Global Spread of Soviet Strategies for Managing Diversity in Multi-National States”
This project examines the implementation and impact of Soviet-style nationality policies around the world (USSR, China, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Romania, and Czechoslovakia) from the 1910s to the present. These policies created autonomous ethnic homelands for minorities, native language education, funding and technical support for cultural and linguistic “development,” and ethnically-based affirmative action policies in training, hiring and promotion. This project asks: what do these policies teach us about the viability of ethno-national autonomy policies (whether linguistic, cultural, economic, or territorial) in multi-national states and are there any lessons that can be learned for current peace-building efforts in regions of inter-ethnic conflict?
Meagan Finlay, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies: “From the Early Modern Kabuki Stage to Modern Screens: Production Practice Legacies and the Crafting of National Identity in Japanese Television Period Dramas”
This project examines how production legacies from traditional kabuki theater have shaped Japan’s TV-jidaigeki (period drama) genre across public and commercial broadcasting. Tracing the genre’s development from stage to film to television, it investigates the continued influence of kabuki aesthetics, performance techniques, and narrative conventions. Using interdisciplinary methods– including archival research and interviews– the study explores how broadcasters use the jidaigeki genre to construct national identity. Through the jidaigeki context, this project addresses key questions in Media Studies and the history of Japanese performing arts, highlighting genre’s cultural constructedness and its role in shaping identity in governmental and commercial realms.
Margaret Fisher, English: “Writing the Autagonist(e): Autistic Women’s Coming-To-Narrative”
This project considers the emergent genre of late-diagnosed, contemporary autistic women’s memoir alongside realist, autistically “resonant” bildungsroman fiction of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, arguing that, through analysis of the narrative elements shared by these works, one can begin to perceive the “autagoniste”: the woman protagonist uniquely and autistically at odds with the world around her. Within the broader tradition of autistic life writing, this project highlights the tendency of late-diagnosed women to model their personal narratives on coming-of-age fiction, thereby positioning the postponed discovery and acceptance of their autism as the journey by which they truly entered the world.
Jennifer Meissner, History: “Growing up Huguenot: Childhood, Youth, and Reformed Identity in Interconfessional France, 1598-1685”
This dissertation examines Huguenot (French-Calvinist) girls and boys from the ‘‘age of reason’’ (7) to their 20s in 17th-century France. Drawing from childhood studies and sociological work on gender and identity, this project relies on a close reading of disciplinary records; letters; diaries and memoirs; and prescriptive literature to reconstruct the lived experience of young Huguenots. Meissner asks how young people responded to the values with which they were raised; when and why they performed communal norms of propriety; the agency that they had to reshape understandings of Huguenot identity; and the role(s) minority status had in these processes.
Shakir Stephen, Religious Studies: “Working Between Worlds: Evangelical Professionals and the Paradox of Privilege”
“Working Between Worlds” is an ethnographic and historical study of American evangelical professionals in the sciences and arts. Focusing on natural scientists, mathematicians, musicians, and tattoo artists, it explores how evangelical professionals navigate tensions between Christian and non-Christian values in their fields. The project challenges dominant “conflict” models of religion and secularism by showing how privilege and marginalization often coexist, and how power emerges through their negotiation. Through participant observation, interviews, and archival research, this dissertation reveals how evangelical actors engage, contest, and reshape professional norms–offering a nuanced understanding of American cultural divides around knowledge, morality, and belonging.
Visit here to learn more about IHC Dissertation Fellowships.