Franke Fellows 2026-2027
Franke Graduate Fellows
(Scroll down to bottom of page for the Franke Undergraduate Fellows!)
Oana Alexan Katz
Department of Spanish and Portuguese; Mellon Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellow in Critical Theory; Public Humanities Cluster Member
Project: Heritage Unbound: Patrimonio nacional, Speculative Materialities and the Cultural Memory of Empire in Spain
Heritage Unbound examines heritage-making projects in contemporary Spain that reimagine cultural memory beyond the nationalist and colonial bindings of imperial nostalgia. Turning to Spanish artists with kinship ties to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the project traces transhistorical and transimperial memory networks that expose the exclusions of the Spanish state’s heritage regime. These artists mobilize speculation to expand the possibilities of heritage in generating belonging.
Emma Cohen
Department of English
Project: Sick Thinking: Illness and Capacity in Early Modern English Literature
"Sick Thinking explores the modes of thought generated by illness in early modern English literature. Moving from the late sixteenth century through the Restoration, I argue that sickbed literature has been a critical site for theorizing capacity and attendant questions of human ability. In particular, the texts in my archive push against a modern impulse towards optimization, instead embracing incapacity, limitation, and dependency as fundamental conditions of human life."
Isabel Griffith-Gorgati
Department of English; Mellon Cluster Fellow in Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies; Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Project: Phantom Islands: Haunted Intimacies in Literatures of Ireland and the Caribbean
Ireland occupies a doubled position in relation to the Caribbean: both share histories of British colonization, yet are also connected through Irish participation in colonial violence. This project develops a comparative methodology that exceeds familiar frameworks of either similitude or domination. From phantom islands to the figure of the Irish vampire, I explore how the mode of the spectral or uncanny animates fraught (post)colonial intimacies within and between these archipelagoes.
Pema McLaughlin
Department of Religious Studies
Project: Butter Bags and Beginners: Remaking Buddhists with the Tantric Preliminary Practices
"Across the Tibetan Buddhist world, monastics and devout laypeople spend months or years completing the Preliminary Practices (ngondro) as a foundation for further study and practice. Through ethnographic interviews, textual history, and literary translations of liturgy, my project explores how this overlooked ritual process transforms its practitioners. Taking up Tibetan Buddhists as co-theorists of religion, I explore the relationship between ritual knowledge and humanistic scholarship."
Franke Undergraduate Fellows
Caroline Cooper
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Project: “Practically Spanish”: Linguistic Modality and Racialized Belonging in 21st-Century East Asian Spanish Literature
"My project examines how writers Chenta Tsai Tseng, Paloma Chen, and Chris Zhang Yu represent the racialized skepticism faced by East Asian Spanish people in Spain, despite linguistic fluency and cultural assimilation. Rather than simply using language to express diasporic identity, I examine how these writers formally use language to represent experiences of racialized exclusion from Spanish national discourse across memoir, poetry collection, and prose poem literary forms."
Mariam Fofana
Department of History
Project: In the Fold of the Lappa: The Worlds of West African Migrant Women in New York City and the DMV, 1961-Present
"West African women forged communities across New York City and the Washington, D.C.-Maryland metropolitan area during a period coterminous with Sierra Leone’s independence and Civil War. Accordingly, my project seeks to usher their gendered practices out of the shadows, charting how cooking, remittance circulation, religious gatherings, and child fostering empowered Sierra Leonean women to build resilient networks of kinship, mutual obligation, and belonging beyond national identity."
Alan Silva
Department of Art History
Project: From Versailles to The Main Stage: Marie Antoinette’s Aesthetic Legacy in The Drag Queen Art Form
This project was born from the question “why are drag queens so obsessed with Marie Antoinette?” To answer this, the research analyzes drag makeup looks inspired by the queen of fashion to unravel the art form’s complex relationship with gender, race, and beauty constructs. Understanding how these ideals were manufactured by 18th century aristocracy, this project shows how drag queens, as politicized, multivalent artists, reimagine said constructs, themselves, and their cultures through creative makeup looks.
Vicky Wang
Department of Art History
Project: Between Japan and the West: The Yoshida Printmakers and Japanese Modernism
"Western scholarship has long studied how Japanese visual culture influenced Western artists, but rarely the reverse. The Yoshida family is a lineage of Japanese woodblock printmakers spanning from the late 19th century to the present, offering a rare, continuous case for examining Western influence on modern Japanese artistic practices. My project explores how the Yoshidas’ travels and encounters with foreign art, from Impressionism to the avant-garde, shaped their evolving printmaking practices across generations."