Six humanities faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences received funding to pursue their respective research projects this summer. 

The college, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice President for Research, is piloting a funding opportunity to enable faculty in the humanities to pursue research projects that require dedicated time, resources, and support. The goal of the award is to enhance humanities scholarship, support career development, and promote strategic research initiatives. 

Faculty members who received funding include: Emerson Cram; departments of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Communication Studies; Jose Fernandez, Latinx Studies; Kathy Lavezzo, Department of English; Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, Department of English; Robert Rouphail, Department of History; and Harry Stecopoulos, Department of English. 

“The select group of scholars who received the awards exemplify what the program is intended to accomplish—providing scholars with an extra impetus to launch a project or push a well-developed idea across the finish line,” said Roland Racevskis, associate dean for the arts and humanities in the college. 

Awarded funds of up to $7,500 may be used for various purposes, including materials, equipment, travel, and dedicated writing space. 

"Humanities scholarship helps us better understand our world and our place in it,” said Kristy Nabhan-Warren, associate vice president for research, professor and V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair of Catholic Studies. “These awards reflect our wholehearted support of faculty pursuing this impactful research." 

Learn more about the six faculty members and their respective projects.

Emerson Cram 

Emerson Cram is an associate professor in the department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Communication Studies. Cram brings expertise in frameworks of critical environmental justice that center recursive relationships between race, disability, sexuality, and the environment. 

Cram will use the funding for a current book project Mad Ecologies: The Energy Politics of Dependency and Need that requires archival research and fieldwork. 

Jose Fernandez 

Jose Fernandez is an assistant professor in the Latinx Studies program. Fernandez’s research interests include American, African American, and Latinx literary histories, Black and Latinx literatures after the 1960s; Latinx intellectual history; and Mexican American literature of the Borderlands. 

He will conduct archival research at three university library collections in California: the Tomas Rivera Papers at UC-Riverside, the Helena Maria Viramonted Papers at UC-Santa Barbara, and the Norma Alarcon Papers at the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley. 

This work will contribute to a book, A Publisher’s Revolution: Arte Publico Press and the Making of Latinx Literature. 

Kathy Lavezzo 

Kathy Lavezzo is a professor in the Department of English. Lavezzo was trained as a medievalist and offers courses on medieval romance, Arthurian lore, the first autobiography in English, and The Canterbury Tales. 

Lavezzo will travel to archives in London, England to work on her new book project, The Hobbit and the Critic. Lavezzo will write one of the book’s five chapters, entitled “Hippies, Hobbits and Stuart Hall.” 

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder 

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is an assistant professor in the Department of English. She is a scholar of the 20th and 21st century transnational American literature and culture.  

She will continue research and writing her manuscript Corporis Fabrica: Encountering the Body through the Book, which seeks out the relationship between the development of anatomy science and moveable books. Rodriguez Fielder argues that their interconnected history has shaped how we understand our bodies. 

Robert Rouphail 

Robert Rouphail is an assistant professor in the Department of History. Rouphail is a historian of modern Africa and the Indian Ocean. He is broadly interested in histories of the environment, empire, and decolonization in the Afro-Asian World. 

He will travel for two weeks to do research in East Africa. The travel will advance his second book project Aerial Regimes: Airports, Airplanes, and the New Mobilities of the Modern Indian Ocean World. 

Harry Stecopoulos 

Harry Stecopoulos is a professor in the Department of English. He teaches modern literature and creative writing. 

Stecopoulos is writing a prequel to his well-received monograph Telling America’s Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy, which was published in 2023. His new project is entitled Entangled Words: Diplomacy and the Making of US Literature, which is a riff on Thomas Jefferson’s disparagement of “entangling alliances” with other nations. 

The project explores how 18th and 19th century writers’ experiences and observations of consults, ambassadors, and diplomats shaped their literary art.