Resident Graduate Scholars
Introduction
We are delighted to introduce the 2026-2027 Resident Graduate Scholars at the UIC Institute for the Humanities.
The Institute's Resident Graduate Scholars receive competitive one-year appointments, during which they receive office space and other resources to complete their dissertations, which are deemed as important contributions to the humanities.
Resident Graduate Scholars join the vibrant community of scholars at the Institute. Each will present a chapter of ongoing research as part of the Interdisciplinary Dissertation Workshop series.
Scroll down the page for links to past years' Graduate Resident Scholars.
Noah Blakemore-Briggs, Political Science
“Spectral Sovereignties: Modern American Spiritualism and the New American Polity”
Noah’s project focuses on the political implications of American metaphysical religion, particularly the Spiritualist movement. Spiritualism began in 1848 and focuses on the possibility of communicating with the dead. The first part of the project explores the possibilities presented by leaning into what Hannah Arendt called the “weirdness” of the bourgeois public sphere; a weirdness she compares, aptly enough, to a Spiritualistic séance. Noah argues that within the world alienation identified by Arendt is a new way of relating to social organization, one already embedded in American political institutions by Spiritualism. The second part develops three case studies related to spirit communication and its political possibilities: the political thought of an Afro-Creole Spiritualist circle in New Orleans; an analysis of espiritista republicanism in the Mexican revolution; and an ethnographic study of American Spiritualists. “Spectral Sovereignties” recovers an imagined republican polity without any significant binary features.
Ritu Ghosh, Anthropology
“Legislating Reproductive Labor: Altruistic Surrogacy in Contemporary India”
Ritu’s dissertation research examines the intersections of gender, reproductive technologies and justice, and law and policymaking in the Global South. Her work focuses on India’s surrogacy industry amid recent legislative reforms that do not recognize surrogate workers as laborers, through the criminalization of compensated reproductive labor. Through ethnographic research, she analyzes how the state’s regulatory turn to “altruistic” surrogacy reshapes gendered subjectivities, raising crucial questions for the value of women’s labor and reproductive justice in India. Her research traces how these policies have contributed to the expansion of underground markets in commercial surrogacy, intensifying the structural vulnerability and precarity of surrogate workers. Her dissertation contributes to broader debates on reproductive governance, labor, and justice by examining how law reshapes both markets and meanings of reproductive labor in India.