Hall Center announces competition winners

LAWRENCE — The Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas has revealed its winners for the upcoming summer and academic year, honoring faculty and graduate students for their groundbreaking humanities research and creative work. These awards provide critical support for travel, research time and scholarly engagement, advancing KU’s contributions to the humanities.

Faculty Research Travel Grants

The Faculty Research Travel Grants offer KU faculty up to $3,500 each to support humanities-oriented research requiring domestic or international travel. This year’s recipients and their destinations are:

• Sheyda F.A. Jahanbani, history: Paris, Cahors, Montpellier and Nimes, France
• Benjamin Chappell, American studies: Los Angeles, New York City
• Rebecca Laughlin Rovit, theatre: Berlin, Germany
• Maya Kerstin Hyun Stiller, art history: Seoul, South Korea
• Abdelmajid Hannoum, anthropology: Malaga, Spain
• Silvia Park, English: Jeju, South Korea
• Linda Galvane, East Asian languages & cultures: Tokyo, Japan
• Midori Samson, School of Music: La Union and Pangasinan, Philippines; St. Louis, Missouri; Heart Mountain, Wyoming

Graduate Student Research Travel Grants

Graduate Student Research Travel Awards provide up to $3,500 to humanities graduate students for research-related travel. This year’s awardees and their research locations include:

• Abigail Grace Scott, history: Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Nantes, France
• Chang Wang, linguistics: Lhasa, Tibet, China
• Josh Edmond Hayes, curriculum & teaching: South Korea
• Xiaoyan Li, American studies: New York City
• Ridwan Aribidesi Muhammed, history: Southwestern Nigeria
• Han Mao, history: Taipei, Taiwan; Tokyo, Japan
• Silvia Sanchez Diaz, anthropology: Guatemala
• Lorena Victoria Mosquera Aguilar, Spanish & Portuguese: Colombia

Hall Center Resident Faculty Fellowships

The Resident Fellowships offer tenure-track humanities professors one semester of release time from teaching and service to focus on research or creative work. This year’s fellows and their projects are:

• Paul Outka, English: “Judgment and the Human,” exploring how contemporary debates on artificial and nonhuman intelligence echo 19th-century judgments about human identity, race and gender
• Michael Joseph Krueger, visual art: “Equine Archetype: Horses in Art as Symbols of Healing and Recovery,” a multimedia project using art and equine therapy to address trauma in at-risk youth
• Patricia Walsh Manning, Spanish & Portuguese: “Correcting Erroneous History in Contemporary Spanish Historical Novels,” examining how post-Franco historical fiction shapes perceptions of 17th-century Spain
• Maki Kaneko, art history: “Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani,” a retrospective exhibition of a Japanese-American artist’s work blending Nihonga techniques with urban survival narratives
• Ninel Valderrama Negrón, Spanish & Portuguese: “Infrastructures of the Spanish Planet: Crafting Loyalty in the Borderlands,” investigating colonial infrastructure’s role in reinforcing racial and political hierarchies in Spain’s last colonies

Mid-Career Research Fellowship

The Mid-Career Research Fellowship provides associate professors a full academic year off from teaching and service to pursue research for promotion to full professor. This year’s recipient is:

• Kent Blansett, history: “Expressions of Red Power: Engaged Resistance and Pop Colonialism,” a book that examines the Red Power movement through Native American use of popular culture across the 20th century

Richard and Jeannette Sias Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities

This fellowship funds two KU humanities graduate students for one semester each to focus on their dissertations while engaging with the Hall Center’s scholarly community. The recipients are:

• Hayden Lee Nelson, history: “The North Woods: An Environmental History from the Pleistocene to the Pyrocene,” tracing the North Woods’ ecological and human history over 12,000 years
• Jeongwon Yoon, art history: “The Boundary Breakers: The Free Artists Association and the Abstract Art Movement in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea, 1937–1945,” exploring abstract art’s role across empire-colony lines

For more information about these awards or the Hall Center’s programs, visit hallcenter.ku.edu.