Resident Graduate Scholars
We are delighted to introduce the 2024-2025 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.
Katherine Brandt, English Heading link
“Addictive Practices: Realism and Substance Use in the Nineteenth-Century Novel”
In “Addictive Practices: Realism and Substance Use in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” Katherine Brandt analyzes representations and manifestations of intoxication and addiction as they pertain to the nineteenth-century realist novel, and more broadly, how addiction itself can be a theoretical foundation for better understanding the development, conventions, and formal technologies of the novel as the conception of addiction emerged during this time. The writers on which Brandt focuses this study utilize both poles of the disease/dis-ease paradigm to link both the phenomenological experience of addiction and consciousness and physiology of their characters to their novels’ investment in realism. Her examination of addiction in the nineteenth-century novel investigates cultural perspectives of the milieu regarding addiction, how they became a defining characteristic of novelistic realism, and how novels, particularly those of the Victorian era, engender and elicit their own addictive practices, both in the experience of the reader and in the work of the novelists themselves.
Themal Ellawala, Anthropology Heading link
“When Ephemera Bind: On Negative & Positive Space and Queer Relationality in Sri Lanka”
This dissertation interrogates the discursive and lived conditions of Liberal modernity in Sri Lanka. Central to this analysis lie two sets of ontic modes which suffuse the field of modernity: speech, action, presence, and certitude (or positive space, the proper objects of Liberal modernity) and silence, absence, inaction, and indeterminacy (or negative space). This analysis suggests that a dialectical interplay of positive and negative space constitutes the intra-subjective, social, and structural dimensions of life in Sri Lanka, with a particular focus on queer and trans lifeworlds in the island. Exploring these traditionally literary questions ethnographically, this research questions Liberal investments in proper objects across a range of dimensions – academic disciplines, the socio-economic crisis in Sri Lanka, enforced disappearance, the colonial regulation of sex – to gesture towards a more expansive and sensitive understanding of what it means to be, and produce knowledge, in relation within Liberalism.