Franke Fellows 2024-2025
April 23, 2024—Announcing the 2024-2025 Franke Graduate Fellows of the Kaplan Humanities Institute!
Mariana Gutierrez Lowe
Department of English; Gender and Sexuality Studies Certificate
Project: Maternal Ruptures: Motherwork and Embodiment in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
"My dissertation examines 20th and 21st century Indigenous and Latinx novels and poetry collections and their representations of motherhood. I argue that family separations and the severing of maternal relationships at the U.S.-Mexico border are caused by border policy, which calls for and builds infrastructure like the border wall, border fences, freeways, and other surveillant technologies aimed at disrupting familial and maternal relationships for Latinx and Indigenous peoples."
Govind Narayan Ponnuchamy
Department of English
Project: Inheriting Energy: Victorian Literature and the Thermodynamics of India's Developmentalism
Comparing Victorian novels with contemporary Indian Anglophone literature, Inheriting Energy explores residues of the British Empire's energy logics as they appear in postcolonial India's national imagination. How have energy’s literary and political manifestations modeled thinking about empire and race in the nineteenth century, and how does it continue to give us ways of thinking about nationhood and power? To answer these questions, this project traces the British empire's scientific and epistemological continuity through the ongoing ways in which Postcolonial India uses, imagines, and writes about energy.
Mustafa Siddiqui
Department of Black Studies
Project: Trans Synthetics: Black Immaterial Praxis and the Politics of Gender Authenticity
Examining politics of authenticity within trans material cultures/cultural phenomena, this project aims to develop a theory of trans immateriality, a racialized-gender analysis that disrupts normative representations of objects and materials relevant to Black trans cultures and bodily politics. Traversing cultural phenomena relating to the body, aesthetic extensions of the body, and sonic/visual representations of bodily politics, this project embarks on an epistemological reimagining of how we come to know the (racialized gendered) body.
Kylie Walters
Department of Radio/TV/Film; Screen Cultures Program; Certificate in Critical Theory
Project: Designs for Refinement: Oil and Architectural Form in Postwar Visual Culture
"My dissertation is a media theoretical and media historical approach to the architecture of U.S.-based oil corporations from the postwar era through the 1973-1974 oil crisis, as oil moved toward competitive globalization and as television and modernism became strategically central. Traversing art and documentary photography, graphic and industrial design, print media, television, and film, the project both situates architectural forms for oil within a broader media history and theorizes architecture as a form of media."
Learn more about the Franke Fellowship Program:
https://humanities.northwestern.edu/research-and-funding/franke-fellowship-program1/index.html