Fellowship Recipients

Assistant Professor

Department of History

Local Women, Global Histories

Du Fei's first book Local Women, Global Histories  studies Muslim women’s participation in the local and transregional economic life that converged in India from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Piecing together a wide array of archives in Persian, Arabic, English, and Dutch, this book argues that elite and sub-elite Muslim women from merchant and landholding households were not simply confined to the home and economically marginalized. Rather, they regularly negotiated with male kins, jurists, judges, and officials in seemingly mundane areas of Islamic law, especially inheritance and property management. Muslim women’s economic life thus defies any easy conceptions of patriarchy, as patriarchal regimes of agricultural production, trade, finance, and empire-making all relied on appropriating women’s capital and labor input. 

Assistant Professor, Iranian Studies

College of International and Area Studies

From the Oilfield to the Battlefield: Revolutionary Internationalism on the Iranian, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, 1904-1921

Nejad’s book, From the Oilfield to the Battlefield: Revolutionary Internationalism on the Iranian, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, 1904-1921, explores the persistence of monarchical rule in Iran. In the early twentieth century, revolutions swept across Iran, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Although revolutionaries from these states initially collaborated in pursuit of common goals, their alliances fractured during World War I. In its aftermath, Russian and Turkish revolutionaries installed socialist and republican governments, respectively. But Iran’s democratic aspirations were cut short in 1921, when a coup in ushered in another six decades of monarchical rule. Using original Russian, Persian, and Turkish-language sources gathered across eight countries, this book asks why Iranian revolutionaries did not achieve the political transformations realized by their Russian and Turkish counterparts. In so doing, it questions the limits of revolutionary internationalism during the First World War and the shift to nationally bounded reform projects in its aftermath.

Assistant Professor, Art History

School of Visual Art, College of Fine Arts

Abstraction Unframed: Abstract Murals at Midcentury

This book manuscript in its final stages examines how artists expanded the reach of one of modernism’s most notoriously difficult art forms: abstraction. Across the midcentury years, abstract painters from Ilya Bolotowsky to Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner turned to muralism as a way to ‘unframe’ their abstractions: to free them from the spatial confines of the easel painting and the social confines of the elite art world. The resulting artworks transformed living and working spaces into dynamic, immersive art environments, and declared abstraction’s true audience to be the broad masses of people who moved through and lived in the modern world. Using archives, blueprints, and digital reconstruction, the book returns abstract murals—often removed from their original sites—to the architectural spaces where they first met their viewers. It shows how abstract murals were engaged in significant American cultural projects, from New Deal populism to the ideology of the midcentury home to the seeming crisis of humanism in postwar corporate culture. Located at the interface between art, architecture, and daily living, abstract murals embody one of modernism’s most enduring fantasies, to bridge the domains of art and life.

Assistant Professor

Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability

Indigenous Markets and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico

Dr. Denham’s project "Indigenous Markets and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico" is an urban ethnography and historical account of the survival of a mainstay of urban foodways since precolonial times - open-air markets held in streets and plazas best known by their Nahuatl name, tianguis. Against the tide of urban renewal and a supermarket explosion that has taken hold of global South cities, Indigenous markets have not only survived but also multiplied, in rhythm with growing cities across Mesoamerica. The surprising persistence of these markets, I argue, is due to a combination of survival tactics, organized resistance, and cultural resurgence. Together, these factors constitute both a movement for food sovereignty in the city and a form of Indigenous production of urban space. The book project reflects two years of ethnographic research conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico that aims to historicize tianguis while offering a contemporary account of the lived experiences of the marketgoers, cooks, activists, farmers, and vendors who propel their resurgence. Focusing on one of Mesoamerica's most ancient urban foodways, the book casts new light on the history of spatial exclusion of Indigenous people from Mexican cities while foregrounding Indigenous struggles against peripheralization and erasure.

Associate Professor

Gibbs College of Architecture

Cultivating Creativity

Cultivating Creativity draws on the newly created American School archive to tell the story of how a small group of faculty at the University of Oklahoma developed a radical approach to teaching architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Through a narrative non-fiction account of the American School’s history, the book details how the faculty built a culture and a curriculum to reflect their shared values. Cultivating Creativity highlights the dramatic and at times tragic human story at the heart of this history by centering on Bruce Goff, chair of the school from 1947-56. Goff led the faculty to design a remarkably successful curriculum that prized originality instead of imitation. Recent scholarship on teaching and learning is woven throughout to help explain why these new methods were effective; we now know, for example, that the harsh learning environments typical of architecture schools negatively impact student learning. Examining the history and pedagogy of the American School, the book considers, how is creativity taught? What kinds of learning environments, practices and assignments best cultivate it? Cultivating Creativity is a book about the history of the American School and a book for the future of design education.

Associate Professor

Department of History

Glacier Fathers and Mother Earth: Race, Gender, and Climate Change in the Bolivian Andes

Cultivating Creativity draws on the newly created American School archive to tell the story of how a small group of faculty at the University of Oklahoma developed a radical approach to teaching architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Through a narrative non-fiction account of the American School’s history, the book details how the faculty built a culture and a curriculum to reflect their shared values. Cultivating Creativity highlights the dramatic and at times tragic human story at the heart of this history by centering on Bruce Goff, chair of the school from 1947-56. Goff led the faculty to design a remarkably successful curriculum that prized originality instead of imitation. Recent scholarship on teaching and learning is woven throughout to help explain why these new methods were effective; we now know, for example, that the harsh learning environments typical of architecture schools negatively impact student learning. Examining the history and pedagogy of the American School, the book considers, how is creativity taught? What kinds of learning environments, practices and assignments best cultivate it? Cultivating Creativity is a book about the history of the American School and a book for the future of design education.

Assistant Professor

Women's and Gender Studies

Killing Radicalism: Neoliberalism, Normativity, and the Anti-Rape Movement

Dr. Chen’s project, Killing Radicalism: Neoliberalism, Normativity & the Anti-Rape Movement, explores diversity in rape victim advocacy. Victim advocates are designated anti-rape workers at nonprofit rape crisis centers who emotionally validate survivors’ experiences with sexual violence and connect survivors to resources, such as counseling and housing support. While advocates are overall helpful at reducing survivors’ trauma, many scholars have overlooked the ways that advocates can hurt underrepresented ‘marginalized’ survivors, such as people of color and LGBTQ+ people, when they separate anti-rape work from activism against interlocking oppressions. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 63 victim advocates and queer methodologies, Killing Radicalism illustrates that even the best intentions can have dire consequences when they are not thoughtful about minority cultural representations.

Associate Professor

School of Visual Arts - Art, Technology and Culture

Ultimate Sim

Ultimate Sim is an interactive artwork, online game, and speculative design tool to tackle the climate crisis. It sits at the intersection of two important contemporary art movements: critical art games and climate-activist art. The project reimagines the popular 1990’s video game SimCity, mimicking its graphics and game mechanics while inverting the overall narrative structure and gameplay of the original. Climate change is a “hyperobject”: an immense, structural force that we cannot comprehend, but strive to, through computer modeling. By shrinking space and time scales of climate change and its array of challenges to the size of a standard 2D video game in a layout that provides its players a gods-eye perspective and modular control, the hyperobject becomes accessible for a broad public to play/test emerging and speculative climate solutions for real world locations. This framework energizes active participation in imagining climate futures and solutions for one’s local environment. Ultimate Sim will be free and accessible online to engage a global, general audience.

Associate Professor

International and Area Studies
Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics

From Drones to Travel Bans: US Violence and Yemeni Visual Narratives of Resistance

Dr. Mahdi's project explores how US security, diplomatic, and cultural sites of influence have produced visual modes of seeing Yemen that renders the country and its people unseen, or more accurately, seen through the global war on terror. He also offers a multi-layered analysis of the aesthetics of Yemeni and Yemeni American visual artists’ responses, ranging from street art campaigns and political cartoons to films, posters, and art exhibitions. The context of his research draws from US-Yemeni cultural politics at the interplay of the tragic attacks of 9/11 (2001) and the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring (2011). Seeing Yemen moves us beyond a US-securitized lens characterized by violence and imperial amnesia to a Yemeni lens marked by witnessing, grieving, and defying erasure.