Interim Provost Beth A. Winkelstein and Vice Provost for Faculty Laura Perna have announced the second cohort of Mellon Fellows. 

The Mellon Fellows Program seeks to support mid-career faculty from core humanities and arts disciplines whose work is strongly based on cultural/historical analysis. The program is intended to orient arts and humanities faculty to the fundamentals of leadership roles, encourage collaboration and community across departments and disciplines, and build the next generation of higher education leaders inflected with humanistic culture and values.

Nikhil Anand, an associate professor of anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses his research on cities, infrastructure, state power, and climate change by studying the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. 

Vance Byrd, the Presidential Associate Professor of German in the School of Arts and Sciences, is a scholar of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature who investigates how literary and print culture intersect with the history of visual media. 

Huey Copeland, the BFC Presidential Associate Professor of History of Art in the School of Arts and Sciences, explores African diasporic, American, and European art from the late eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on articulations of Blackness in the western visual field. 

Eva Del Soldato, an associate professor of romance languages in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies Renaissance thought and culture, with special attention to the reception of the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions in the early modern period. 

Huda Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic literature in the School of Arts and Sciences, focuses her research on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. 

Jared Farmer, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies the histories of built and unbuilt environments, with temporal expertise in the long nineteenth century and regional expertise in the North American West.

Glenda Goodman, an associate professor of music in the School of Arts and Sciences, specializes in American music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the material culture of music and book history, amateur music-making and gender, and soundscapes of colonialism.

David Hartt, an associate professor of fine arts in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, creates work that unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of his various subjects, exploring how historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time.

Lisa Mitchell, an associate professor of south Asia studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches the Telugu-speaking regions of southern India through such topics as the genealogies of democracy in India, public space and political protest in Indian democracy, and the street and the railway station as public space. 

Projit Bihari Mukharji, an associate professor of history and sociology of science in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies issues of marginality and marginalization both within and through science, most recently human difference and race in 20th century South Asia.

Zita Cristina Nunes, an associate professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies comparative African American/African Diaspora literature, literatures of the Americas, and literary theory.

Anna Papafragou, a professor of linguistics in the School of Arts and Sciences, studies the nature and growth of human language (especially linguistic meaning) across different communities and learners.

Avishag (Abby) Reisman, an associate professor in the teaching, learning, and leadership division of the Graduate School of Education, researches the challenges of teaching document-based historical inquiry, including the design and implementation of curriculum materials, assessments of student learning, teacher education, and professional development.

Lauren Ristvet, an associate professor of anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, specializes in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern history and archaeology, with an emphasis on the formation and collapse of archaic states, landscape archaeology, human response to environmental disaster, and ancient imperialism. 

Jolyon Baraka Thomas, an associate professor of religious studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, researches religion in Japan and the United States, including studies of manga, anime, and religion in contemporary Japan and of religious freedom in American-occupied Japan.