Fellows
The Taft Fellowship programs support advanced graduate students, post-PhD scholars, and faculty with dedicated time and resources for sustained research and creative endeavors.
These include both our signature residential fellowship programs (Center, Dissertation, and Postdoctoral Fellows), and non-residential Faculty Release and Summer programs, as well as a new residential, thematic Counter Fellows program for 2026–27.
Current Residential Taft Fellows
Center Fellows
RJ Boutelle
English
The Gift of Guilt: How a Novel Helped Survivors of America's Only Coup Expose the Wilmington Massacre
Joanna Huh
English
Damaging Intimacy: Reimagining Community in Early Modern Drama
Matthew Kraus
Judaic Studies
Chanukah Through the Ages
Kelly Merrill
School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies
AI for All: Building Community Health Equity Through AI Literacy
Bingyu Zhang
Mathematical Sciences
Analysis and Control of Nonlinear Dispersive Waves
Dissertation Fellows
Ramy Amin
Philosophy
Deflating Physical Computation: A Basic Schema for Computational Explanation
Sarah Bostic
Sociology
A Genealogical Study of Unintended Pregnancy
Ethan Davis
Mathematical Sciences
Wave Patterns surrounding large-amplitude rogue waves and universality
Marin Deevers
School of Public and International Affairs
On Socialization and Sexual Values in the United States
Anna D'Orazio
English
Positioning Learning Transfer as an Affective, Material and Lifelong Act
Nathan Hudson
Economics
Doubly-Synthetic Control: Using AI Personality Agents for Policy Counterfactuals
Ilir Isufi
Philosophy
Interdisciplinary Tensions in the Study of Cognition: Integrating Philosophy of Mind, Anthropology, and Psychology Through a Critique of Linguistic Relativity
Trevor Johnson
Mathematical Sciences
Large-Parameter Asymptotics of Laguerre Rational Solutions to Painleve V
Asher Marron
English
Unmade
Omer Okzan
School of Public & International Affairs
Weaponizing Imagery: How States Use Drone Footage to Shape War, Policy, and Diplomacy
Postdoctoral Fellows
Harshavardhan Bhat
Harshavardhan Bhat is a 2024–26 Taft Postdoctoral Fellow and researcher and writer interested in the social study of monsoonal futures. Bhat is currently thinking through concerns of an abolitional meteorology, exploring the archives of global climatic logistics and its accounting categories, in unpacking stories of race, tropical meteorology and decarceration. His book manuscript Maḷḷæ explores the death of seasonalities and politics of a global story of rain, at a time of breakdown.
Alex Dantzer
Alexandra Dantzer is a 2025–27 Taft Postdoctoral Fellow and cultural anthropologist specializing in insomnia. Her work contributes to critical conversations in medical anthropology, temporality, and urban life. Her manuscript Awake in the World; Insomnia and the Arts of Living in Belgrade merges ethnographic theory and historical contextualization with poetic and multimodal elements demonstrating how creative forms can deepen analytic insight. Probing the limits of ethnographic inquiry, her writing examines familiar expressions - racing against time, feeling out of sync, not present, exhausted, adrift from one’s own time, not being in control - which reveal how time is not only learned but disciplined through the everyday routines of modern life. She is an author of a collaborative book Glossary of Insomnia in which she explores the experience of sleeplessness through poetry, short stories and essays. She is an award-winning filmmaker, and has published extensively on insomnia, tracking technology, ethics in anthropological research and existential experiences such as stuckness.
Counter Fellows
Francis Ametepey
School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies
Countering Accountability: Informal Obligations, Transparency Ambiguity, and Kickback Practices in UN-NGO Partnerships
Nimisha Bhat
UC Libraries
Threading the Needle: Renewing Value in Research Through Craft Pedagogy
Sandra Boateng
English
Oral and Communal Narratives as Counter-Archives of Disability in Ghana
Felicia Denaud
Africana Studies
On Perspectival Autonomy
Jena DiMaggio
English
Beyond Choice: Narrating Abortion Before Roe
Stephan Fiol
Ethnomusicology
Dialects of Dhol: Amplifying Dalit Drumming through Participatory Digital Scholarship
Jake Hawthorne
Philosophy
Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge: Brain Drain, Quantification, and the Erosion of Zetetic Freedom
Eric Jenkins
School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies
Just Stop Oil & Understanding Modes
Nick Koenig
School of Environment and Sustainability
Counter-Quilting: Memorializing & Mapping Alternative Representations of Climate Loss & Climate Futures
Todd Lu
Sociology
The Quantification Struggle Over Workplace Heat Safety: Socio-Cultural Dimensions of Heat Triggers and Temperature Measurements
Hassaan Mizra
English
The Other Osama
Christine Ochs-Naderer
English
Everyday Wonders: Reimagining Human Writing in an Age of Machines
Rebecca Sanders
School of Public and International Affairs
From Counter-Terrorism to Counter-Narcotics
Yash Sharma
School of Public and International Affairs
Ambient Violence, Democratic Being, and Political Subjectivity in Contemporary India
Sachin Sisodiya
Economics
Informational Nudges and Prescription Pain-Reliever Misuse
Current Non-Residential Taft Fellows
Faculty Release Fellows
Melissa Jacquart
Philosophy
Integrating Philosophy of Science in Public Engagement with Science
Aditi Machado
English
A TEST OF FRAGILITY
Kara Moranski
Romance and Arabic Languages & Literatures
More human than human? Examining human-machine interaction in the age of AI language learning
Stephen Haas
School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies
Communication and Relational Resilience in LGBTQ+ Couples
Jeffrey Zalar
History
Catholics and Natural Science in Modern Germany, 1830-1914
Faculty Summer Fellows
Anima Adjepong
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Documenting Discriminatory Profiling
Ben Farrer
School of Public and International Affairs
How to Address the 'Tragedy of the Commons' in Attention to Politics
Muhammad Faruque
Romance and Arabic Languages & Literatures
Why Read Mulla Sadra Today?
Michael Loadenthal
School of Public and International Affairs
Counter-Far-Right Cyber Campaigns: Tactics, Targeting, and Measurable Effects
Todd Lu
Sociology
Adapting to Heat Stress in U.S. Workplaces: Towards a Relational Model of Safety Culture
Thomas Polger
Philosophy
Understanding Computational Explanation in the Neurosciences
Rebecca Sanders
School of Public and International Affairs
War Without Battlefields: Legal Transposition and the Militarization of Crime
Leah Stewart
English
Travels in Your Company: A Novel
Rachel Torres
School of Public and International Affairs
Repacking the Immigrant Suitcase: From Pre-socialization to Strategic Acculturation
Gary Wiessman
English
Five Women Surviving
Graduate Summer Fellows
Sarah Bostic
Sociology
When Medicine Has No Map: Medical Authority and Patient Expertise in Carney Complex
Ilir Isufi
Philosophy
From the Field to the Lab and Back: How the Neglect of Culture Impedes Linguistic Relativity Research
Selena Laikos
Mathematical Sciences
Mathematical Modeling Reveals that Photoadaptation and a Continuous Pulse Function Accurately Depict the Mammalian Circadian Response to Light Induction
Ana Maria Molina
Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures
From "New Theatre" to "Collective Creation": Staging state violence in contemporary Colombian theatre
Erin Noehre
English
Militant Study: Black feminist legacies of resistance in the poetry of June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, and Jayne Corte
Fatemeh Rezaei
Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Archive of Traces
Brittany Theodore
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
White Femininity and Carceral Constructions: The Indiana Women's Prison as a Site of Gender Discipline (1873–1884)
Yi Wang
Mathematical Sciences
Hyperbolicity of Warped-Product Spaces and Visual Boundary