2026-27 Awarded Fellowships

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Environmental Studies Program at Vassar College, where she holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. She works at the intersection of the fields of literature, environmental history, and cultural studies, specializing in the multidisciplinary, comparative study of the Caribbean region. She is the author of Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Literatures of the Caribbean (2008), and Creole Religions of the Caribbean (with Margarite Fernández Olmos, 3rd ed. 2023). Recent book projects include Looting Hummingbirds: Selected Poems of Daniel Thaly (with Mark Andrews, 2026), and the first translation into English of Volume One of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s The General and Natural History of the Indies, Islands, and Mainland of the Ocean Sea (with Michael Aronna, 2026). While at the Huntington, she will work on a book, “The Mighty Ceiba: Sacred Tree of the American Tropics,” which moves from an exploration of the Ceiba pentandra’s centrality in the worldview of various indigenous peoples of the pan-Caribbean region and in the mythologies that explain the creation of the world, to its present status as a tree species that anchors rich biodiversity habitats that provide a buffer against the effects of climate change.

Kate Masur is the John D. MacArthur Professor at Northwestern University. Her most recent book is Freedom Was in Sight! A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region, which was published in 2024 by UNC Press and co-authored with illustrator Liz Clarke. Her previous book, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and winner of several other awards. She led a team of students and staff at Northwestern in creating the web exhibit Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice, part of the acclaimed Colored Conventions Project. She has also worked extensively with the National Park Service, museums, and other nonprofits, and has co-authored amicus briefs in high-profile court cases. With Greg Downs (UC-Davis) she co-edits the Journal of the Civil War Era. She and Downs recently completed a book, Why Reconstruction Matters, which will be published in 2027 by Yale University Press. At the Huntington she will be working on a project on sex, pregnancy, and human rights in the nineteenth-century United States. 

David Como is Joan Danforth Professor of History at Stanford University.  He is author of Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (2004), and Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (2018) (winner of the NACBS John Ben Snow Prize and the Samuel Pepys Award).  His work focuses on religion and politics in early modern England and the English Atlantic world.  While at the Huntington, he will be working on two projects, the first a new history of the English civil war and regicide, the second a study of the transformation of political life in the Anglophone world across the early modern period.

Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and, during the 2025-26 academic year, Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford.  He has written extensively on the American Revolution, emphasizing the entangled history that Americans shared with the rest of the Americas, as well as with Africa, Europe, and the wider world.  His books include The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (2000), winner of the Jamestown Prize from the Omohundro Institute, Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (2005), co-edited with Peter S. Onuf, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012), which won the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and the first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World (2021), co-edited with Paul Mapp and Carla Gardina Pestana.  He has held long-term fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice), the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University, and the Fulbright-Hays Program to the United Kingdom.  In 2026-27, he will be the Robert Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.  His current book project, Peace and Independence: The Turbulent History of the United States’ Founding Treaty, is about the peace treaty that ended the War of American Independence. 

Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Professor of English; Professor of Cultural and Global Studies; and Director of Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies (LLACS) at Northeastern University. She is the author of two books, both published by Duke University Press: Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (2011) and Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora (2021). As a public-facing intellectual and industry leader, she consults for higher education institutions regarding the publication process and DEI. During her tenure as the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow in American Culture and History at the Huntington Library, she will be completing two book manuscripts, Intimate Partner Violence and Racial Capital in Latinx America, 1880-1917 and A Short Latinx History of the Anti: Abortion, Immigration, and DEI. 

Pilar Tompkins Rivas is an LA-based artist, curator, and museum executive. Previously, she was Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Curatorial and Collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art . She has organized a wide range of exhibitions that have advanced the study of US Latinx and Latin American contemporary art in the Los Angeles region and nationally, including seminal exhibitions of artists Iván Argote, Carolina Caycedo, Beatriz Cortez, Patrick Martinez, Eamon Ore‑Giron, Gala Porras‑Kim, Guadalupe Rosales, and Gabriela Ruiz. In 2017-20 she oversaw the touring exhibition Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, developed for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. At The Huntington she is working on a project on “Chicanx Art in the Making of Civic Identity and Cultural Infrastructure in Los Angeles.”

Joan Flores-Villalobos is Associate Professor in the Van Hunnick Department of History at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on histories of gender, race, labor, and diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book, The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal, was published by Penn Press in 2023. Her work has garnered support from the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. While at the Huntington, she will complete research on “Veins of Gold: Intimacy, Race, and Extraction in the Essequibo Borderlands,” a project on the formation of the Essequibo as a fragile frontier of extraction through Black migrant labor exploitation, Indigenous displacement, and settler colonial conflict in the nineteenth century.

R.A. Kashanipour is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arizona where he specializes in the history of medicine and science in early modern Latin America. His research explores the intersections of production of scientific knowledge and everyday experience in colonial Mexico through records of cuisine, disease, mythology, and metaphysics.  He has particular interests in colonial recipe books that detail everyday practices of eating and healing and early modern works of science fiction that reveal lived experiences and imagined futures. At The Huntingtotn, he will be working on his current book project The Morality of the Moon: Fable, Science, and Fiction in Enlightenment Mexico, examines how common people engaged with the discourse and practices of science. Microhistorical in its approach, this book uses the first known Latin American work of science fiction—a fable of a journey to the moon in the year 2510—as an entry point to examine the social and intellectual nature of Mexico in the eighteenth century.

Meredith Oda is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her first book, The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (Chicago 2018), was a transpacific and multiracial story of early Cold War urban redevelopment and race-making. At the Huntington she will work on her second book, Alien Belonging: Japanese American Resettlement and Incarceration during WWII, which explores how Japanese Americans left the incarceration camps during the war and rebuilt lives in communities all over the country. Despite their status as perhaps the period’s most vilified aliens, they turned “alien” into a capacious and mutable category by demanding, using, and sometimes refusing mobility in camp and on the outside. Japanese Americans thereby reshaped their imprisonment, turned jailers into advocates, and transformed their position of dangerous alienage at the height of Asian exclusion.

Padma Rangarajan is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British literature. She is the author of Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (Fordham UP, 2014) and Insurgent Fictions: The British Empire and the Birth of Terrorism (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming). While at the Huntington she will be gathering material for her new project, tentatively titled Hydraulic Empire, Riverine Fictions, a study of the literary, political, and environmental significance of river systems to the British Empire. 

Minayo Nasiali is an Associate Professor at UCLA and a historian of modern European imperialism, migration, and racial capitalism. Her first book, Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship, and Everyday Life in Marseille since 1945 (Cornell University Press, 2016), examines how local debates over belonging and the built environment produced a discriminatory system of social welfare in modern France.  Her current book project, Sea Traffic: Race, Rebel Sailors, and Offshore Capitalism in the Afroeuropean Maritime World, examines how seafarers of African descent engaged with and circumvented systems of economic and political coercion in the long twentieth century. 

Ginger Nolan is Associate Professor of architectural history at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on relationships between raciality, political struggles, technology, and aesthetics. She has published two books with the University of Minnesota Press: The Neocolonialism of the Global Village (2018) and Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design (2021). At the Huntington Library she will be consulting archives related to her current book project, tentatively titled “Black Capitalism and the City: Architecture, Insurance, and Risk.” This book navigates the historical tensions between Black Marxism and Black capitalism through an analysis of the urban and architectural interventions of African American-owned life insurance companies. 

Romeo Guzmán is a historian, cultural worker, and editor. He is currently an assistant professor at Claremont Graduate University. Trained in Latin American history, his research uses archives in Mexico and the United States to offer transnational histories of Mexican migrants and Mexican-Americans. Since 2012 he has co-directed the South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP). He is an editor-at-large at Zocalo Public Square, and the co-editor of Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California (Angel City Press, 2024). At The Huntington, he will be completing the book manuscript “Orphans of the Nation: Mexican Americans and Transnational Citizenship in Greater Mexico. Guzmán’s public history work strives to transform how underrepresented communities enter the historical record and to redefine the role of both historians and archives in society.

Dr. Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a scholar of the social and cultural history of modern South Asia (1765-1950) and the British Empire in the modern world (1830-1960). His writings address social histories of agrarian life in South Asia, histories-from-below of the British Empire, plant studies, and critical histories of drugs and addiction. He is the author of Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India (California, 2026) and other articles in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, English Language Notes, South African Historical Journal, and Historical Reflections. He is currently a co-editor of Social History of Alcohol and Drugs (University of Chicago Press). At the Huntington, he will be working on his second book on British colonial interventions in human and plant relations, specifically involving stimulation and intoxication, in South Asia through elaborate taxation regimes that eventually transformed ideas of selfhood, gender, addiction, habit, and interspecies relations. Combining plant studies, botanical humanities, and political economy, the book uncovers new aspects of the early modern English East India Company exploration of flora, vegetation, and natural history in the Indian Ocean World. 

Haley Bowen is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University. She is a cultural historian of early modern France and its empire, with research and teaching interests in gender, religious culture, and state formation. At the Huntington, she is finishing her first book, entitled The Worldly Cloister: Laywomen, Convents, and the State in the Early Modern French Empire. Her project investigates how and why French convents across the empire came to occupy varied roles as sites of refuge, conversion, and incarceration in the lives of laywomen during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bowen’s work has been previously supported with grants from the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Rackham Graduate School, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, among others. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 2023 and her B.A. from Harvard College in 2014.

Hardeep Dhillon is currently an Assistant Professor in Asian American History and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates how legal status can serve as an analytical tool to study the distribution of rights, resources, and privileges in society. She is particularly interested in how legal status has been historically used as a proxy for race in structuring inequality in the United States. At the Huntington, she is finishing her first book project which asks: How have Americans historically used the legal status of immigrant parents to limit their children’s rights, including claims to birthright citizenship? How have immigrant communities fought back? And how have these battles shaped law and politics in the United States? More specifically, the book follows cases involving Asian American families during and after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Felipe Ledesma Núñez is an Ecuadorian sculptor and historian of sound whose research explores the Ancient Andes through seventeenth-century sources and the creation of ceramic sound artifacts. At The Huntington, he will work on “La Escucha de Chuquillanto” (“Chuquillanto’s Listening”), a monograph that reframes our understanding of pre-Columbian Andean ontology by examining how the stigmatizing lenses of colonial sources distort Indigenous vibrant knowledge and suffering. Using a monumental manuscript from 1590 colonial Peru about an impossible love between an Inca princess Chuquillanto and a humble shepherd Acoytapra, he explores Andean life through the materials inadvertently preserved in the colonial archive.  

Alex Lewis earned his PhD in English from Johns Hopkins in 2022 and was a Long-term Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library from 2024–2025. His research focuses on comparative early modern literature and the history of sexuality. His current book project looks at one of early modernity’s most notorious but critically neglected characters: the cuckold. It asks why this figure became the object of such potent fascination for authors and audiences from the fifteenth to seventeenth century.  

Zheming (Taro) Cai is a designer and historian of landscape architecture. His research interests include landscape and garden history, the transnational production and circulation of landscape design, and plant humanities. He holds a PhD in Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, where his dissertation “Chinese Landscape Architecture in Transnational Exchange, 1970s-2020s,” examines the negotiation and professionalization of landscape knowledge and practice in China since the late Cold War period. He is also the founder of In-Situ Collaborative, an interdisciplinary design research practice. At the Huntington, Cai will investigate gardening as a technical practice and form of embodied knowledge in premodern China. Drawing on the Huntington’s collection of Chinese paintings, prints, and horticultural treatises alongside its living gardens, his research asks how the secular labor of gardening was represented, transmitted, and encoded in the visual and textual sources. By foregrounding these marginalized practices and practitioners, the project develops new methodological approaches to Chinese garden history that move beyond literary and iconographic frameworks to engage with the material and tacit knowledge that shaped designed landscapes. 

After receiving an MA in Medieval History and working for several years as a field archaeologist, Cristiano Zanetti earned a PhD in the History of Science and Technology from the European University Institute in 2012. His research explores the historical relationship between power, intellectuals, and artisans in the development and institutionalization of superior craftsmen, engineers, practical mathematics, innovation, and invention between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, with a particular focus on central and northern Italy and the Spanish Empire. Zanetti has published widely on Early Modern technology and is the author of monographs on medieval architecture and Renaissance technology, with special attention to Janello Torriani (Juanelo Turriano), court inventor to Emperor Charles V and King Philip II of Spain. This figure, central to his PhD dissertation, was also the subject of an international exhibition curated by Zanetti in Italy and Spain in 2016 and 2018. He has conducted postdoctoral research at the Medici Archive Project (Florence), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), the Centre Alexandre Koyré (Paris), the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti (Florence), and the University of Milan. He is also the recipient of the García-Diego International Prize for the History of Technology (7th edition, June 2014, Madrid). Most recently, Cristiano has worked on a project on Renaissance automata (1350–1650) as a Marie Curie postdoctoral scholar at Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy) and Caltech (Pasadena, California).

Andrew Isenberg is a Distinguished Professor of History and the Hall Chair of American History at the University of Kansas.  His books include The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850 (2025); Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (2013); Mining California: An Ecological History (2005); and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (2000, 2020).  At the Huntington, his research explores late eighteenth-century anti-federalist politics and the public memory of militia service during the Revolution.

Jordan Claridge is an Associate Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. His work asks how individuals, societies, markets, and industries adapted to often cataclysmic change the medieval world: plague, demographic collapse, and the expansion of trade. His recent monograph, Horse Power in Medieval England: The Equine Economy c.1200–c.1400 (CUP 2026), examines how medieval England was supplied with working horses, its most important source of energy, and how peasants came to dominate the trade of these animals. At the Huntington, he will be undertaking the first detailed, empirical assessment of the scope and scale of unfree labour in medieval England. The image of serfs labouring in the fields is one of the most enduring tropes of the medieval world. Yet while the rise and fall of other aspects of serfdom have been actively researched, our understanding of labour coercion remains surprisingly limited.

Patricia Dawson is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and Assistant Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. Her current manuscript project examines Cherokee clothing as a tool of diplomacy, symbol of identity, and weapon of resistance against Euro-American encroachment in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the early nineteenth century, Cherokee women transformed their economy through cotton agriculture and cloth production, and they were at the center of the Nation’s resistance to Removal through textile diplomacy. Dawson also worked with family members to edit A History of the Cherokee Nation by Rachel Caroline Eaton, Dawson’s great-great-great aunt who is believed to be the first known Native American woman to get a PhD.