The UC Davis Humanities Institute has announced five new faculty research fellowships for the 2025-2026 academic year. All five projects among faculty within the College of Letters and Science are centered around book projects, including one work of fiction.
The Faculty Research Fellowship is aimed at helping ladder-rank faculty in the humanities, arts and qualitative social sciences make progress on a major research or creative project and to enable faculty to work with colleagues in other disciplines and departments.
This year’s projects center on less commonly researched areas and perspectives.
Meet the 2025-2026 UC Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellows:
Zinzi Clemmons
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Heaven: A Novel of Black Utopia
Zinzi Clemmons is working on a second novel. The fellowship will help Clemmons continue researching the Guinda Summit community in Yolo County, where the novel is based.
The novel, Heaven, follows a modern-day narrator — also modeled after herself — who uncovers a former black utopian-agrarian society near her home. According to her fellowship application, Heaven engages long-standing debates around racial segregation and integration; nationalism and multiculturalism.
“I conceived of Heaven about three years ago, after discovering the historically black community in nearby Guinda, just 40 miles northeast of Davis in Yolo County. This community was founded by Green Berry Logan, whose mother was a slave and whose father was white, in the wake of U.S. Reconstruction,” Clemmons explained in her application. “Summit has a rich history, with several landowning Black families who remained there for generations, some of whom were involved in the Civil Rights Movement.”
As part of her research and work, Clemmons will also create a recorded oral history of the community.
Clemmons’ first novel, What We Lose (Viking, 2017), was named “Debut Novel of the Year” by Vogue and received praise from The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker. It was loosely based on Clemmons’ experience caring for her mother who was dying of cancer.
Lilia Soto
Associate Professor, Department of Chicana/o/x Studies
“Re-reading the Napa Valley: Other Roots, ‘Leading Ladies,’ and ‘Luminaries’”
Lilia Soto writes about the Napa Valley, where she grew up. The fellowship will help support her current book project on Latinx women who helped shape Napa’s wine industry.
One chapter will focus on Vanessa Robledo who, at age 20, became a leader in her family’s winery. Under her leadership, the Robledo Family Winery went from a small-scale winery to producing over 20,000 cases.
Robledo’s story will help Soto illustrate the rise of Mexican American wineries and situate her life story within the changing context of 1990s Napa, the politics of the wine industry and the openings that allowed for the success of the Robledo Family Winery.
“The goal of this project is to present a Napa Valley that is fluid, contradictory, and with conflicting roots that continue to shape its present,” Soto wrote in her application. “Ultimately, this project is about rooting and unrooting traditional narratives of the Valley. My goal is to document, via Napa and the broader North Bay, rural understandings of the Chicanx/Latinx/Indigenous/Afro-Latinx experiences and contribute to our varied existence beyond urban spaces.”
Soto’s first book, Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration (NYU Press, 2018) addresses the experiences of young teenage girls raised in transnational families where time, age, sexuality and gender are key factors.
Natalia Duong
Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies and Science and Technology Studies
“Chemical Diasporas: Tracing Toxicity through Ecological Solidarity”
Natalia Duong, is currently working on a book project examining the spread of the herbicide Agent Orange through a study of cultural media, disability law and community-engaged research in Vietnam.
Chemical Diasporas: Tracing Toxicity through Ecological Solidarity introduces the concept of a chemical diaspora as an infrastructure that traces the movement of toxicants as a network of harm but also a source of political solidarity.
“In contrast to scientific studies that posit that contamination exists in discrete plots of land, my book brings together archival analyses of military maps and toxicology reports, cultural analyses of autobiographies, visual art, and performance art created by queer and disabled diasporic Vietnamese artists, and over 15 years of community-engaged research in Vietnam within disabled communities,” Duong wrote in her application. “These humanistic methods shed light on the complexities of debilitation that most scientific studies often efface.”
Julietta Hua
Professor, Department of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies
“Insurance, Racial Infrastructure and the Financialization of Domestic Life”
Julietta Hua is interested in labor, citizenship and the law. Her current project, Insurance, Racial Infrastructure and the Financialization of Domestic Life, is a critical, feminist and humanistic investigation into the financialization of life enabled by insurance. It traces how the rise of the insurance industry cements life as a key, quantitative factor in the financial infrastructure of the U.S. national economy.
“The focus of the work for the award period is centered on developing and researching the tentative final part, which looks at bracero oral histories and archives to understand how the parceling of life-value into body parts (legs, arms, fingers) is about distinguishing between lives valuable because they sustain other lives, from lives assumed to be valuable in and for themselves,” Hua wrote. “What I am interested in exploring for the award period are the ways the principles of insurance — that life has a tabulated, calculable value; that life-values are differentials; that life-value is about speculating future-labor value — shape the idea of migrant labor and the experience of immigrant workers.”
Hua is the author of Trafficking Women's Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), which examines U.S. anti-trafficking laws and policies, and co-author of Spent Behind the Wheel: Drivers' Labor in an Uber Economy (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Kathleen Cruz
Assistant Professor, Department of Classics
“Competing Visions: Classical Antiquity and Puerto Rican Identity in the 19th and 20th Centuries”
Kathleen Cruz is working on a book project exploring the various positions Puerto Rican intellectuals took in the 19th and 20th centuries when considering what relationship the island should have with Greco-Roman antiquity.
“Over the course of the book, I examine the imperial and colonial origins of these beliefs and how they intersect with contentious debates regarding Puerto Rican personal and national identity, including in respect to the island’s status as a colony or potentially independent nation,” Cruz wrote in her application. “In doing so, I contribute to ongoing research into the reception of the ancient Mediterranean in Latin American and Latine communities while also highlighting the complex synchronic and diachronic perspectives at work in the Hispanic Caribbean, which has received significantly less attention in these conversations.”
As part of the work, Cruz plans to make available English translations of Puerto Rican poetry, correspondence and documents which have only previously been circulated in Spanish.
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