Franke Graduate Fellows 2025-2026
April 30, 2025—Announcing the 2025-2026 Franke Graduate Fellows of the Kaplan Humanities Institute!
Clara Wenrong Lee
Department of Performance Studies; Certificate in Critical Theory
Project: Thickening the Plot: Unruly Racial Formations
Thickening the Plot turns to the histories of cultivation—including botany, agriculture, and landscaping—as fecund sites for tracing the co-constitutive materialization of race, sex, and gender. It situates the colonial plantation as both the living laboratories from which the modern racial regime was consolidated and overlooked terrains for mapping wayward, unruly, experimental notions of racial aesthetics, affects, and embodiments that exceed as well as elude the more conventional understandings of the historical-racial schema.
Ishan Mehandru
Program in Comparative Literary Studies (Home department: Asian Languages and Cultures)
Project: Dispersed Relations: Caste, Communalism, and Women Writers in South Asia
"My project argues that the ruse of a secular nation-state represses inequalities of gender, caste, and religion in postcolonial South Asia. Turning to a set of women writers across the Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Anglophone public spheres, I trace a literary counter-history that challenges fantasies of syncretic and constitutional assimilation. These writers reimagine solidarity through 'dispersed relations,' relinquishing the desire for a shared community by foregrounding a poetics of unfulfilled love and friendship."
Sofía Sánchez
Department of Spanish and Portuguese; Mellon Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellow in Theatre and Performance
Project: Dramaturgies of Reparation: Community-Based Theater and Restorative Justice in Colombia
This project explores the reparative potential of Colombian grassroots theater organizations to demonstrate that their performances serve as practices of reparation and reintegration for survivors of violence and former offenders. Through the concept of "Dramaturgies of reparation," it argues that traumatic experiences of violence, expressed through dramaturgical exercises, allow communities to reinvent themselves as political actors, reconfigure their experiences, renegotiate their place in the public sphere, and thus conceptualize reparation and peacebuilding in novel ways.
Michael Slattery
Program in Music Theory and Cognition, Department of Music Studies; Critical Theory Cluster
Project: The Heavens Are Telling: Cultural Meanings of the Do-Re-Mi
"My project investigates recurring musical patterns as sites of communication as well as units of structure. I examine one brief musical pattern, the Do-Re-Mi, in the works of Haydn, Beethoven, and Bruckner. By positioning the use and reception of the Do-Re-Mi in its 18th and 19th century contexts, I understand its musical ascent as signifying a rich network of meanings that includes sunrise, the sublime, and religious devotion."
Learn more about the Franke Fellowship Program:
https://humanities.northwestern.edu/research-and-funding/franke-fellowship-program1/index.html