Franke Future Directions Forum
A showcase for the humanities research done during their fellowship year, the Future Directions Forum is where each Franke Fellow—graduate and undergraduate—presents their project and receives interdisciplinary feedback from the Kaplan Institute community.
2025 FRANKE FUTURE DIRECTIONS FORUM
Friday, May 2, 2025
8:45 am to 3:00 pm
Kaplan Humanities Institute—Kresge Hall #2350
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SCHEDULE
8:45-9:00am: COFFEE AND LIGHT BREAKFAST
9:00-9:10am: Laura Brueck (Director) – Opening Remarks
Session I
9:10am-9:40am: Anna Dellit (Departments of Black Studies and Legal Studies)
Manufacturing Blackness: State Facilitated Vietnamese Refugee Conceptions of Blackness, 1975-1990
9:40am-10:15am: Kylie Walters (Department of Radio/TV/Film; Screen Cultures Program; Certificate in Critical Theory)
Designs for Refinement: Mobil and the Visual Culture of Oil, 1960-1980
10:15am-10:30am: COFFEE BREAK
Session II
10:30am-11:05am: Govind Narayan Ponnuchamy (Department of English)
Inheriting Energy: Victorian Literature and the Thermodynamics of India's Developmentalism
11:05am-11:35am: Diana Deng (Comparative Literary Studies Program and Departments of Radio/Television/Film and Mathematics)
Between China, Chile, and South Africa: A Creative Collaboration in Poetry
11:35am-12:10pm: Mustafa Siddiqui (Department of Black Studies)
Trans Synthetics: Black Immaterial Praxis and the Politics of Gender Authenticity
12:10pm-1:00pm: LUNCH
Session III
1:00pm-1:35pm: Mariana Guttierez-Lowe (Department of English; Gender and Sexuality Studies Certificate)
Maternal Ruptures: Motherwork and Embodiment in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
1:35pm-2:05pm: Caroline Drapeau (Departments of English and Theatre)
Creaturely Characters: Domesticated Animals in the Victorian Novel
2:05pm-3:00pm: FINAL THOUGHTS AND RECEPTION