Spring 2026 IHC Award Winners

June 11, 2026

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 2026–27 year and will participate in a Fall 2026 convening of the multicampus UC Humanities Graduate Fellows Collaborative. Congratulations to these graduate students!

Joshua Baldelomar, Film and Media Studies: “Neural Power: Media Practices and Patients in the Makings of Transnational Brain Sciences”
This dissertation examines how brain scientists in Europe and North America from the early to mid-twentieth century used media to address scientific and social problems surrounding the neural body. Defining media as technologies and forms that render relationships between people and knowledge tangible, it asks how media’s properties and cultural meanings aligned with claims that the brain constitutes mental and physiological states, and how media positioned pathologized patients as exemplary sites of data. It argues that interactions with patients shaped scientists’ use and understanding of media, while also tracing exchanges with public and artistic visual cultures.

Martina Mattei, Comparative Literature: “Dante for All Ages: The Divine Comedy in Visual Media”
 This dissertation offers the first transnational study of children’s adaptations of Dante’s Divine Comedy across Italian, Anglophone, and Japanese contexts, bridging literary studies, adaptation theory, and childhood studies. It examines how visual media (from picturebooks to manga) translate complex ethical and aesthetic questions for young audiences in contemporary image-driven cultures. By comparing these traditions, the project reveals how cultural assumptions shape the mediation of violence, sexuality, and otherness, and develops new tools for analyzing how knowledge is transmitted across generations. Combining archival research with public-facing exhibition work, it advances interdisciplinary methods while expanding the objects and audiences of humanistic inquiry.

Abylay Stambayev, History: “Tarbağatai: A Multispecies History of Industrial Pastoralism on the Kazakh Steppe from the 1930s to the Present”
This project chronicles the environmental, political, economic, and cultural transformations that came with industrial pastoralism to the Kazakh Steppe from the 1930s to the present. This is a multispecies history, an approach that brings together fields of environmental history, anthropology, history of science, and broadly environmental humanities. It follows a diverse group of actors: grasses and shrubs, bees and rodents, sheep and parasites, shepherds, scientists, and state officials. This project illuminates how communists sought to discipline nature and labor, how indigenous pastoral knowledge and science informed bureaucratic decisions, and how the steppe ecology constrained ambitious plans to maximize productivity.

Giovanni Vimercati, Film and Media Studies: “Film Capital: Beirut & The Centrality of a Peripheral Market”
This dissertation reframes the history of postcolonial film industries by shifting attention from national production to the infrastructures of circulation that shaped film cultures in the Global South. Drawing on film and media studies, political economy, and postcolonial theory, it reconstructs Beirut’s role as a nodal point in a trans-regional network connecting West and East Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Western and Eastern Europe. Based on extensive archival research, the project demonstrates how Lebanon’s service-oriented economy, (neo-)colonial dynamics, and a fragmented national project produced a distinctive cinematic culture: international(ist), consumer-oriented, and structurally embedded in global systems of exchange.

 Mingyi Xiao, Comparative Literature: “African Influencers Going Viral in China: Toward a Theory of Racialized Over-Performance”
This dissertation investigates African influencers who have gained popularity on Chinese digital media platforms. Branding themselves as promoters of Africa–China friendship, they attract large audiences by performing “Chineseness”: speaking fluent Mandarin and regional dialects, singing Sinophone pop songs, and cooking authentic Chinese cuisines. This research conceptualizes “overness” as structuring the influencer’s subject position—an excess that continuously negotiates and unsettles boundaries between African and Chinese, foreign and native. The continuous stream of digital content tends to reinforce disparities of race, gender, and geopolitics by transforming biases into banalities.

Visit here to learn more about IHC Dissertation Fellowships.