Featured Research: Unsettling the Colonial Imaginary
This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects examine imperial ambitions and the roles imagination played in myriad colonial endeavors.
Featured Research
Fellows at the National Humanities Center explore an astonishingly diverse array of topics, touching on people, events, and ideas across time and geography.
Below you'll find Fellows sharing a little about how they were inspired to pursue the subjects they study, insights they've gained through their research, and how their work contributes to their disciplines and to our understanding of the human experience.
Featured Research: Writings on the Wall
This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects examine private and public forms of correspondence—from letters of enslaved children to street graffiti—and reveal how these forms of communication not only illuminate different understudied perspectives but also can invoke political change.
Featured Research: The Case for Care
This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects examine the capacity to care and public discourses surrounding bodies and illness. These projects challenge us to think about how we might address deficits of compassion—whether instigated by fear of illness or ableism—to expand the scope of human dignity.
Featured Research: Public Rightdoing and Wrongdoing
This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects explore accountability as an ongoing process of revision, and how the pursuit of serving and tending to ourselves reveal new insights concerning discrimination, surveillance, and peacekeeping.
Featured Research: Writers, Writing, and the Self
This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects explore writing as an embodied process in the lives and practices of writers, and as means through which we shape and come to understand lived experience—both our own and that of others.
Featured Research: Landscapes, Physical and Metaphorical
This month we highlight the research of 2024–25 Fellows whose projects explore how we relate to nature and how those relationships, in turn, shape how we think about ourselves.
Featured Research: Balancing the Scales
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects consider the pursuit of justice, both criminal and social, in a variety of contexts and through diverse means—governmental investigations, courts, artistic protest, and the development of communities united by shared experiences of discrimination.
Featured Research: Changing Perspectives
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects reexamine historical actors, events, and eras by shifting the perspectives through which they’ve previously been viewed. They encourage us to assume a different point of view and to consider previously unnoticed aspects revealed about the lives of their subjects.
Featured Research: Life in a Data-Driven, Technology-Mediated World
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects explore how computing has reshaped thinking around everything from political power to literary study and how the promises and perils of technological advances are best measured through a humanistic lens.
Featured Research: City, Town, Village
This month we highlight the research of 2023–24 Fellows whose projects explore the human experience through the lens of settled spaces, revealing new insights about the importance of place in understanding the human experience.