Resident Graduate Scholars
Introduction
We are delighted to introduce the 2025-2026 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.
Bert Geyer, Art History
Designing the Forest: The Aesthetic and U.S. Imperial Forestry, 1862-1942
What if forestry is considered an aesthetic practice pursuing design acumen over beauty? From Civil War land legislation to the conversion of the New Deal to WWII production, this dissertation analyzes U.S. imperial forestry as a site of burgeoning contest over who designs the forest and how. It proposes forestry sensoria attuned throughout U.S. imperial peripheries as equally pertinent to aesthetic history as those in art and architectural history and philosophy situated in metropoles of the U.S. and Europe. Afforestation and reforestation projects in the Midwest, Philippines, and Caribbean make salient the reflective judgment, shuttling amidst reason and sensory experience, integral to perceiving the forest. Historicizing forestry sensoria both registers how normative imaginations of the forest materialized into distinct forms and suggests the perceptual dimension of normative judgements regulating forest technics as a necessary reckoning of environmental design in the Anthropocene.
Benjamin Seigle, English
The Jewish Questions of the American Novel: 1904-1973
“The Jewish Questions of the American Novel: 1904-1973” is a dissertation about empire, Jewishness, and American fiction. The dissertation argues that the problem of Jewish belonging, or the Jewish question, exists as a vexing and ubiquitous one in America throughout the twentieth century. The research focuses on non-Jewish writers to show how the novel was a critical site in which Jews were uneasily incorporated into an imperial America. This account of American modernism examines how writers from Henry James to Thomas Pynchon deployed Jewishness to relate America to a broader world and to detail the possibilities and failures of an ostensibly anti-colonial nation committed to freedom and equality that simultaneously and hierarchically exercised far reaching military and economic might.