Franke Fellows 2026-2027
Franke Graduate Fellows
Franke Graduate Fellowships, supported by generous funding from Richard and Barbara Franke and The Graduate School (TGS), bring together four outstanding doctoral students in the humanities to cultivate their research and teaching in the interdisciplinary setting of the Kaplan Institute. Franke Graduate Fellows devote two quarters, full time, to shaping their projects during fall and winter. They also receive pedagogical mentoring in developing an undergraduate course that they teach in their home departments in the spring, and present their research at the Future Directions Forum in spring 2027.
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."