The Davis Humanities Institute, or DHI, has announced five new faculty research fellowships for the 2026-2027 academic year. This year’s fellows, women from across the College of Letters and Science, are all working on completing book projects.  

“The Faculty Research Fellows program is the DHI’s flagship award and it gives faculty what they often need the most: time,” said Jenny Kaminer, DHI director and former fellow. 

The fellows receive a quarter-long course release, giving them uninterrupted time to focus on their research and writing. They also participate in an interdisciplinary work-in-progress workshop, in which they receive feedback from their peers; and receive support from the DHI to showcase and share their work broadly, including through a public showcase for the Davis community and through external grant and engagement opportunities. 

"The award has always emphasized interdisciplinary exchange,” Kaminer said. “It’s a cohort model that deliberately brings together scholars in different fields to share feedback on each other’s work. Our hope for the Faculty Research Fellowship is that it enriches each participant’s scholarship in entirely new ways by breaking down institutional silos.” 

This year’s fellows are from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Department of Asian American Studies, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Music. 

Understanding and improving the human experience  

During the DHI’s Faculty Research Showcase this past spring, the previous cohort reported that one of the most helpful parts of the program was receiving support and feedback from their peers. 

This feature of the program really demonstrates how humanistic work has the opportunity to speak widely and draw us together in the greater pursuit of understanding the nuance and complexity of human experience.

— Kathleen Cruz, 2025-2025 fellow 

Bringing a humanistic approach to practical social issues was a theme among last year’s cohort as well, albeit sometimes unexpectedly.  

“It became clear to me over this quarter how many of us are pursuing work distinct to our disciplines which also has broader social consequences and insight,” reflected Associate Professor Kathleen Cruz, a 2025-2025 fellow. “For example, my work is deeply grounded in classics but also aims both to speak to Puerto Rican/Latine experiences and to share that experience with many other audiences not rooted in either of these communities. Other fellows’ work pursued similar ends, revealing hidden narratives across socio-economic class, gender, immigration status, and racial identity.” 

The 2026-2027 cohort features researchers whose work bridges the theoretical and the practical, seeking to affect concrete change — from evolving how institutions of higher education support native Spanish speakers, to shaping childcare policy, to developing new frameworks to aid in the legal fight against climate change. 

Meet the 2026-2027 DHI Faculty Research Fellows:

Agustina Carando 

Associate Professor of Spanish 

Director, Heritage Spanish Program 

“Writing Between Languages: Heritage Spanish, Translanguaging, and Peer Tutoring in Higher Education” 

Agustina Carando is working on a book that uses the Heritage Spanish Program at UC Davis as a case study for research and analysis about teaching, taking a qualitative and quantitative look at how language instruction for heritage Spanish-speaking students — meaning they speak Spanish at home — improves academic performance, confidence, sense of belonging, retention and graduation rates. Carando also looks to create a “best practices” framework repeatable by other institutions, especially those serving Hispanic, first-generation undergraduates.  

“Researchers and administrators are looking for ways to serve a growing student population interested in developing and maintaining more advanced academic skills in their home language,” Carando explained in her application. “The proposed project will offer a comprehensive investigation of peer tutoring in a heritage Spanish program, introducing a unique model of instruction for practitioners in the field that combines advances in bilingual education and writing studies.” 

Athia Choudhury 

Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies 

“Gut Cultures: Metabolic Personhood and the Promise of Wellness” 

Athia Choudhury’s research takes the wellness narrative and upends it. Her book in progress, Gut Cultures, examines the obscured relationship between modern conceptions of health in the U.S. and legacies of empire and militarism in eating cultures across North America, Asia and the Pacific. 

“I argue that 20th century U.S. public health policy and scientific knowledge production around diet, metabolism and fat consumption transformed colonial sensibilities around race and gender into empirical regimes of measurement: data sets on health, eugenics and evolutionary potential,” Choudhury wrote in her application.  

Choudhury will use the time given by the fellowship to complete the final chapter of the book and prepare her manuscript. 

Suzana Sawyer 

Professor of Anthropology 

"The Material Ethics of Climate Change" 

In Suzana Sawyer’s previous book, The Small Matter of Suing Chevron, which won the American Ethnologist Senior Book Prize, she traces a 25-year legal saga that “spans three different continents, three different judicial systems, and three different, although related, litigations to understand how truth gets made legally.” 

During the fellowship period, Sawyer will complete a chapter for a book that follows another environmental case: a successful 2022 lawsuit by nine Amazonian girls against the Republic of Ecuador to shut down gas-flaring at oil-well sites in the region.  

“Gas-flaring at well sites is a ubiquitous oil-industry practice across the globe and 

accounts for 30-40% of anthropogenic emissions of methane gas,” Sawyer explained in her application. Noting that the Ecuadorian court ruled gas-flaring unconstitutional, Sawyer said she will explore how Indigenous and scientific collaborations are shifting how knowledge about how gas-flaring (a historically normalized practice) is produced, de-normalized and made a problem. 

Valerie Taing 

Assistant Professor of Sociology 

“Professionalizing Families: Ambiguous Roles in the Indirect Welfare State” 

Valeria Taing is working on her first book, Professionalizing Families: Ambiguous Roles in the Indirect Welfare State, during the fellowship period. In it, she examines how the contemporary U.S. welfare state operates indirectly by professionalizing family relationships rather than providing direct services or cash transfers — blurring the roles between, for example, grandmother and paid caregiver.  

“I argue that this role ambiguity is an inadvertent outcome of chronic political ambivalence over the needs of poor families and the value of women’s paid and unpaid labor,” Taing wrote in her application. “Role ambiguity is a structural feature of the indirect welfare state produced by decades of partial, vague consensuses that have deferred and avoided distributional questions about who should pay for care, whose labor counts and how, and what the state and families owe to each other.” 

In addition to completing the book, Taing plans to share her findings with government officials, advocates and caregivers through convenings in the East Bay, Seattle and Chicago — the three sites of her research.  

Rachana Vajjhala  

Assistant Professor of Music 

“Nautchwork” 

Rachana Vajjhala’s first book, Kinetic Cultures: Modernism and Embodiment on the Belle Epoque Stage, argues that, historically, ballet was implicated in the larger republican project of national rehabilitation in Paris through a rehabilitation of its citizens. By tracing the various gestural complexes of the period — bodybuilding routines, appropriate physical comportment for women, choreographic vocabularies —Vajjhala presented a new way of understanding histories of dance and music, one located in gesture and the other in movement. 

Vajjhala’s second book, Nautchwork, builds upon the first, diving deeper into the issue of how non-notated embodied practices circulate and persist into a colonial and postcolonial context.  

“My research thus considers not only the complex transnational intersection between traditions — European and Indian — but also the equally vexed one between the music and the dance of those very same traditions,” Vajjhala explained in her application. “By destabilizing the notion of unmarked European art dance through historical and ethnographic work, I aim to revise what bodies have been — and can be — balletic.” 

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