AGHI offers a range of support for graduate students. Graduate Research Fellowships award one semester of funding to advanced graduate students working on a range of fields across the humanities and humanistic social sciences. During the Spring semester, Fellows carry on their research while meeting regularly with AGHI board members and affiliate faculty to share and discuss their work. The PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies (IHS), meanwhile, is a new doctoral program, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. IHS students working at the intersection of two disciplines craft their own PhD, one that combines the insights, faculty support, and results of this unique interdisciplinary research.
2025–2026 Graduate Research Fellows
We are excited to welcome five new scholars as the incoming 2025–26 cohort of AGHI graduate research fellows. Full info about individual fellows’ bios and projects below.
Eleni Theodoropoulos
B.A. in Humanities Honors and Philosophy
Email: [email protected]
Bio: Eleni Theodoropoulos is a PhD candidate in Comparative Thought & Literature. Her research interests include experimental nonfictional narratives written by women with an interest in modernist fiction, literature and philosophy, and the generic border crossings between the essay, autobiography, and the novel that have yielded hybrid forms such as essayistic fiction or the collective autobiography. She’s also a literary translator from Modern Greek.
Project Summary: Eleni’s dissertation project concentrates on twentieth- and twenty-first century essayistic methods of narrating the self that bridge into fiction. She explores the essay’s development of subjective modes of narration into quasi-novelistic representations of consciousness which peaks in modernism with Virginia Woolf. With the use of three suggestive examples—Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Annie Ernaux’s Les Années, and Modern Greek author Melpo Axioti’s Kadmo—this project attempts to show how the confluence of essayistic and novelistic form has led a key set of women writers within and since modernism to experiment with new forms of self-writing. Blending close literary analysis with a theoretical treatment of the epistemological problems involved in mimetically rendering subjective mental states, this dissertation aims to deepen understanding of the ways in which genre and form overlap with questions of literary history, women’s studies, and philosophy.
Arthur Lee
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Arthur is a PhD candidate in History focusing on cultural and social history in eighteenth-century France and the French Atlantic, particularly during the French and Haitian Revolutions. He previously earned degrees in biochemistry, history, and French at the University of Texas at Austin.
Project: Arthur’s dissertation centers on the destruction of two major French cities, Lyon and Cap-Français, during the French Revolution. His project shows how the cities’ destruction melded political repression and property expropriation with progressive social measures such as poor relief and the abolition of slavery. Both occurring in 1793, the destructions pose questions about the aims and implementation of revolutionary terror and asks whether the central contradiction of the Revolution – how did a revolution centered on human rights produce terror? – was indeed a contradiction in the revolutionary Year II, at once the most radical and most repressive moment of the Revolution.
Jonah Shallit
B.A. in English and Political Science, University of Toronto
M.A. In English, University of Toronto
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Jonah Shallit is a PhD Candidate in English with a focus on modernist studies and transnational literature. His writing has appeared in Australian Literary Studies, the Wallace Stevens Journal, and has recently been accepted to Modern Philology. His other research interests include utopian studies, philosophy of language, and depictions of chess in literature.
Project: Jonah Shallit’s dissertation research explores how modernist experimentation assumed utopian political commitments by engaging with social movements to construct universal and international languages. Many writers of the early to mid-20th century, including H. G. Wells, Ezra Pound, and Melvin Tolson, were acutely interested in language projects like Esperanto, and Jonah’s dissertation will examine how their literary works intervened in debates about what a hypothetical universal language should resemble.
Kia Torab
Email: [email protected]
Research Interests: philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics.
Biography: Kia Torab is a PhD candidate in Philosophy focusing on the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and emotion. He previously earned degrees in philosophy and molecular biology at UC Berkeley.
Project: His dissertation examines primitive emotions, i.e., forms of emotions which do not rely on sophisticated cognition, and which are widespread in animals and infants. These emotions do not rely on capacities for language, theory of mind, self-governance, or long-term planning. What, if anything, justifies the attribution of emotion to animals and infants, and what is the nature of such emotion? The project combines ordinary ways of thinking about emotion, based on introspection and common sense, with contemporary affective science.
Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies (IHS) Students
Gianluca Giuseffi Grippa
BA, Humanities (Literature, history and philosophy), University of Milan
MA, Modern Literature, University of Milan
Email: [email protected]
Biography: TBA
Project: TBA
Hannah Haegeland
BA, History and English Literature, Concordia College
MA, South Asia, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Hannah Haegeland is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program, working between the Department of the History of Science and Technology and the Department of Political Science. She researches military science and technologies in twentieth-century Asia. From 2011-2022 she held research and teaching positions related to the history and security of southern Asia in Albuquerque, Washington, D.C., Seattle, New Delhi, and Kathmandu.
Project: Hannah’s project works to recover some of the silences in Global South nuclear histories. When scientific knowledge and technologies developed in one time, geography, market, language, community, political and strategic environment migrate to other spaces, the ways individuals, institutions, and states interact with them can change, along with the actual character of those technologies and science. The nature of that interaction has a lot to do with how key strategic, bureaucratic, and technical actors want to use the science and technology. Hannah’s research will complicate universalist, deterministic scholarship by studying how and why key stakeholders engage with nuclear science and technologies differently or the same in distinct contexts over time.
Goh Rui Zhe
BA in Philosophy, Yale-NUS College
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Rui Zhe is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies, working at the intersection between philosophy of mind and perception science. He is fascinated by the temporal nature of experience, and his research explores how the human mind segments the continuous flow of perceptual input into the discrete events that we experience.
Project: In daily life, there are moments in which we seem to hear silence, such as when we listen to the quiet night, or when an exhilarating orchestral performance ends abruptly. However, these experiences of silence are puzzling because they seem to be characterized by the absence of sound—what could we possibly be hearing, if not sound? In his current project, Rui Zhe uses empirical and philosophical tools to investigate the nature of silence perception. To date, he has discovered empirical evidence showing that the auditory system segments moments of silence into discrete perceptual events. Building on these experimental findings, Rui Zhe is now exploring the possibility that experiences of silence are the result of the auditory system segmenting empty periods of time into discrete units. In the words of the playwright Tom Stoppard, silence may be “the sound of time passing”.
Jennifer Marks
BA, Anthropology and Classical Civilization, Beloit College
MPH, International Health, Boston University School of Public Health
MA, Museum Studies certificate (Classical Archeology), Tufts University
MA, Ancient Greek & Roman Studies, Brandeis University
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Jennifer is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program, working between Classics and Near Eastern Studies. She holds degrees in Anthropology and Classical Civilization from Beloit College, International Public Health from Boston University, Ancient Greek and Roman Studies from Brandeis University, and a Museum Studies certificate from Tufts University. Her research interests include the archaeology and material culture of the Aegean Bronze Age, particularly Minoan/Mycenaean textile craft production and specialization, metallurgy, and early Minoan mortuary practices, in addition to the application of ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology to ancient crafting techniques.
Project: Jennifer’s project aims to access the lived experiences and creative work of women who labored in the textile industries of the Bronze Age Aegean and Ancient Near East, by newly foregrounding the ways in which their biographies – as migrants, mothers, and craftspersons – embodied connections between these two regions. Drawing together two areas of the ancient world, her research, diachronic in scope, will culminate in a close study of workgroups of women from western Anatolia who migrated to Greece with their children as textile laborers for the Mycenaean palace at Pylos.
John Lafe Shannon
BA, Sociology, Saint Xavier University
MA, Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago
Email:[email protected]
Biography: John is a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program, working between Near Eastern Studies and Earth and Planetary Sciences. He holds degrees in Sociology from Saint Xavier University and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. His research interests are the archaeology of Arabia, geoarchaeology, and the archaeology of trade and exchange.
Project: John’s research focuses on chlorite vessels that were carved by the peoples of Arabia and Iran during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Despite their ubiquity in the archaeological records of civilizations surrounding the Persian/Arabian Gulf, it remains unknown where the stone for these vessels originated. By linking chlorite vessels to geological sources, John seeks to extrapolate the trade networks within which these vessels were produced and distributed.
Shengshuang Wang
BA, Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing University
MA, Comparative Literature, Renmin University of China
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Shengshuang holds a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Nanjing University, and she received her master’s degree in Comparative Literature from Renmin University of China. In 2019 she was accepted into the German section at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. Currently, she is studying in the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program to combine her interests in German studies and Sinology.
Project: Her research focuses on the influences of German literature and philosophy on Chinese modernity, especially on Chinese intellectual and political movements in the 20th century. Shengshuang also continues her investigations on the contemporary German writer W. G. Sebald, especially the theme of repetition in his works.
Tatiana Avesani
BA Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milan, Italy
MA New York University
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Tatiana’s research has mostly focused on Italian Renaissance Literature. Specifically, before coming to Johns Hopkins, their work explored the relationship between political structures and language. Specifically, it analyzed the ways in which politics shaped the development of the Italian language in the debates taking place in Italy in the 15th and 19th centuries.
Project: Through the Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies Program Tatiana is bridging Italian Studies with Classics. Their projects aims at exploring the Italian Renaissance via Neo-Latin literature by posing questions of gender and identity through the lens of language. They hope that by working with Transgender Studies theory they will be able to shed a new light and reading of cultural production in the Italian Early Modern period.