As the academic year turns over on July 1st, the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI) is heartened to share some news about our outgoing fellows and graduate affiliates. In 2023–24, AGHI partnered with programs and departments across the university and beyond to support 12 Society of Fellows postgraduates, 5 Graduate Research Fellows (GRFs), and 8 Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies graduate scholars.

To our entire community of graduating and departing scholars, we wish you all a joyful, fulfilling, and peaceful year ahead. These programs could not have survived without your hard work, dedication, and resilience of spirit. Thank you.

Here is the news shared by a few of our amazing graduate and postgraduate community at the closing of this academic year:

• Gabriella Fee (Society of Fellows 2022–24): Gabriella has won a Fulbright Foundation grant for 2024–25 to work on literary translation and poetry in Italy. More info about Fee’s award-winning project and work here (via the Hub); and more about Gabriella’s publications, collaborations, and research at her website.
• Jennifer Marks (IHS, Near Eastern Studies/Classics): Jennifer will be attending a 2-week intensive summer course in Linear B and Mycenaean Greek at the British School at Athens (BSA) in July. The course aims to familiarize students with the role Linear B has played in the history of interpretation, largely known through archaeology, of the Late Bronze Age Aegean.
• Vincenza Mazzeo (Graduate Research Fellow ’23–24): Vincenza co-authored a book chapter, “Racism, Colonialism, and the Structure of Medical Knowledge in the Earliest Period of the Global COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign, 2020–2021,” in The Politics of Knowledge in the Biomedical Sciences (Dec. 2023). Since then, she presented two research papers at the 2024 Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (also known as Congress) which covered her work on anti-Blackness and Afrophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic and her dissertation research. For 2024–25, Mazzeo will be completing her dissertation as an awarded recipient of the Hawkins Research Fellowship in History.
• Elisa Santucci (Society of Fellows, ’22–24): Elisa will be joining the faculty at Washington College for a Visiting Assistant Professorship in German! Beyond this appointment, Santucci has been working on an array of original and scholarly writing: in addition to several book reviews and publishing reports for major academic presses, Santucci has two contributions to the JHU Office of Diversity & Inclusion’s Trans Utopia and Expanding Genders initiatives, on “Trans-Ability: Between and Beyond Enablement and Disablement of Trans Lives” (2024) and “Constellation People” (forthcoming, 2024).
• Chris Taylor (Graduate Research Fellow ’23–24): Chris not only defended his dissertation (entitled, “Artificial Life in the Transwar Japanese Imagination”), but has now been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship with the Department of Comparative Thought & Literature for the upcoming year. Taylor will be spending part of the summer participating in an NEH summer institute at ASU’s Asia Center, focusing on “Translation and Traveling Texts: East Asian National Literatures in an Era Without Borders.” And — to cap it all off — Chris will be teaching on of AGHI’s Blast Courses, starting on July 8th…
• Indeed, we are lucky enough to have THREE of our graduate students (/recent graduates!) teaching for Blast Courses this summer: Chris Taylor’s “2500+ Years of Artificial Life: AI and the Idea of the Human” (register here); John L. Shannon’s “Ancient Highways: Trade Routes of the Middle East and North Africa” (register here); and Shengshuang Wang’s “The Image of China, At Home and Abroad” (waitlist available).

Keep an eye on our People directories to see the updates as new Society of Fellows members (2024–25), graduate fellows, and other affiliates join us for the upcoming year. And to our new and returning affiliates, we welcome you to what promises to be a fantastic year of programming, conversations, and innovative collaborations. Cheers to 2024–25!