At the university ranked #9 in the nation, we’re not exactly surprised to see another year of incredible scholars joining AGHI’s fellows and students. And yet this year’s cohort of Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies PhD students and yearlong advanced graduate researchers are a true testament to the range, depth, and brilliance of what grad students at JHU are doing.

Joining us as graduate research fellows for 2023–24:

• Nat Adams (Anthropology)—working on cultural anthropology, environmental and racial justice, and urban studies
• Thai-Catherine Matthews (English)—working on “close-reading race” in medieval studies, manuscript and print culture, and contemporary pop culture
• Vincenza Mazzeo (History)—working on gender, race, health, biomedicine, and notions of “freedom” in late 20th-century South Africa
• Sumin Myung (Anthropology)—working on human-plant relations, cross-cultural communication, and ecological & environmental anthropology
• Chris Taylor (Comparative Thought & Literature)—working on aesthetics, the senses, media, and philosophies of technology

In addition, the new IHS students for 2023–24 are:

• Tatiana Avesani (Classics and Italian)—project: exploring the Italian Renaissance via Neo-Latin literature by posing questions of gender and identity through the lens of language
• Hannah Haegeland (History of Science & Technology and Political Science)—project: recovering some of the silences in Global South nuclear histories
• Goh Rui Zhe (Philosophy and Psychological & Brain Sciences)—project: using empirical and philosophical tools to investigate the nature of silence perception
• Jennifer Marks (Classics and Near Eastern Studies)—project: considering the lived experiences and creative work of women who labored in the textile industries of the Bronze Age Aegean and Ancient Near East
• Marshall Meyer (Comparative Thought & Literature and Modern Languages & Literatures)—project: reading the German idealist canon through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis (and vice versa)
• Pyar Seth (Anthropology and Political Science)—project: an intellectual history of medical diagnoses, categories, and descriptive terminologies with an ambiguous/disputed pathophysiology of Black life and death
• John Lafe Shannon (Near Eastern Studies and Earth & Planetary Sciences)—project: tracing trade networks via chlorite vessels that were carved by the peoples of Arabia and Iran during the Bronze and Iron Ages
• Shengshuang Wang (German [MLL] and Sinology)—project: the influences of German literature and philosophy on Chinese modernity

Full bios and project descriptions for these amazing students is available on our Current Grad Students page. We welcome them all!

[Image of Gilman quad in autumn by John D’Alembert via Wikimedia Commons.]