Congratulations to our award recipients and our warm thanks to all who applied.
The Simpson Center for the Humanities announces the recipients of our Summer Fellowship awards for 2026-2027 after receiving many strong proposals during our most recent funding round.
During the 2026 Winter Funding Round, the Simpson Center welcomed proposals for Faculty Summer Fellowships: New Approaches to Meet the Moment and for Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships. We also accepted nominations for the 2027 Annual Digital Humanities Lecture. Meet the Moment fellowships support tenure-track faculty pursuing research projects that seek in some way – through their forms, methods, themes, arguments, or intended audiences – to meet our current historical moment. Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships support tenure-track faculty and doctoral students pursuing research projects that use digital technologies in innovative and intensive ways and/or explore the cultural, societal, and historical implications of digital technologies.
Congratulations to our award recipients and our warm thanks to all who applied.
Faculty Summer Fellowships: New Approaches to Meet the Moment
Naomi Macalalad Bragin (Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell)
Grief Rituals
Purnima Dhavan (Associate Professor, History)
The Politics of Resilience: Environmental Change, Labor, and Precarity in the Upper Indus Valley, 1580-1720
Jelani Ince (Assistant Professor, Sociology)
Shepherds and Kings: How Philanthropy Stymies Diversity’s Potential
Erin McElroy (Associate Professor, Geography)
Technofeudal Fever Dreams: Silicon Fiefdoms, Doom Loop Dystopics, and the Urban Anxieties of Empire
Adair Rounthwaite (Professor, School of Art, Art History & Design)
The Right Aesthetics: Religion, Politics, and Contemporary Art
Diana Flores Ruíz (Assistant Professor, Cinema & Media Studies)
Image Capture: US-Mexico Border Apprehension and Immigrant Surveillance Abolition
Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships
Mal Ahern (Assistant Professor, Cinema & Media Studies) and Jingrui Yan (PhD Candidate, Cinema & Media Studies)
An Encyclopedia of Media Toys
Ashfaq Ahmed (PhD Student, Jackson School of International Studies)
Petrified Wedding of the Himalayas: A Digital Archaeological Preservation Project of Ghora Gali Gool in Indian Occupied Kashmir
Andrew Hedding (Assistant Professor, Linguistics)
A Public Digital Archive of San Martín Peras Mixtec
Meichun Liu (Assistant Professor, Art, Art History & Design)
Touching Tacit Knowledge: Preserving the Embodied Practices of Artists through Tactile and Virtual Archives
Nikoloz Nadirashvili (PhD Student, Art, Art History & Design)
Blessed by the Feed: Digital Strategies of Neo-Soviet Religious Nationalism
Paul Jason Perez (PhD Student, Information School)
Digital Archive of Philippine Transnational Activism
Zhifan Sheng (PhD Student, Asian Languages & Literatures)
Enveloping Affect: The Epistolary Network of Early Chinese Feminism
Vanessa de Veritch Woodside (Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Tacoma)
Latine/x Legacies in Tacoma and the South Puget Sound: An Interactive, Interdisciplinary, and Accessible Digital Platform