Fellows

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Postdoctoral Fellows

Marios Falaris

Postdoctoral fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2024-25)

Marios Falaris (PhD, Johns Hopkins, Anthropology) is directing “Stories of Displacement,” an initiative that circulates oral history collections via podcasts and participatory public events, highlighting themes of displacement and community safety. Focusing on Black LGBTQ artists, displaced East Baltimore residents, Latinx and Indigenous students and workers, and refugee cooperative members, Marios plans to transform oral histories into public discussions, train organizations in oral history techniques, and create a shared platform for addressing displacement and safety.

Milan Terlunen

AGHI/Tabb Center Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-25)

Milan Terlunen (PhD, Columbia University, Comparative Literature) supports public humanities initiatives spearheaded by the Tabb Center and Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI). Milan is co-founder of the Humanities Podcast Network and creator of the “How To Read” podcast. Through two year-long Public Humanities Fellowships at Columbia, he mastered geospatial mapping and public data humanities. At Johns Hopkins, Milan’s work will strengthen the relationship between AGHI and the Sheridan Libraries, enhancing the public humanities’ reach and impact.

Public Humanities Fellow

Nicoletta Darita de la Brown

Nicoletta Darita de la Brown is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and chamána (shaman) who comes from a long line of healers. She is Black Latinx; proud to be a first-generation Panamanian born in the United States. Her performances have been staged at The Phillips Collection, The Smithsonian, and The Walters Art Museum. Her video and installations have been presented at The Tribeca Film Festival, the Baltimore Museum of Art, IA&A at Hillyer Gallery, and Cardinal Gallery. As a Public Humanities Fellow, de la Brown is researching Special Collections materials focused on black women and interpreting these collections through video artwork, self-portrait photography, collaborations with high schoolers, and site-specific performance art.

Visit de la Brown’s personal website

Learn about de la Brown’s exhibition Be(longing): Unveiling the Imprint of Black Women Hidden in Plain Sight

Dean’s Undergraduate Research Award (DURA) Fellows

Natalie Wang

Film and Writing in the Archives: Gertrude Stein Collection and Asian American Screenplays

Natalie Wang is conducting research with materials related to Gertrude Stein and a selection of screenplays depicting Asian and Asian American characters at the Sheridan Libraries. Wang’s Stein research will culminate with a film, based on archival materials, that provides a biographical overview of Stein’s life and works, and visually reimagines a selection of her writing. Wang will also draw on textual and visual analysis to offer a new perspective on treatments, representations, and lasting influences of Asian characters, actors, and cultures throughout Hollywood history. The expected outcome is a research paper that critically discusses these findings alongside close readings of chosen archival scripts.

Mentors: Douglas Mao, Meredith Ward, Gabrielle Dean

Mingyuan Song

Chemical Shackles: Psychotropic Abuse in Carceral States

Mingyuan Song is undertaking a research project centered around the American Prison Writing Archive and other primary sources to reveal the nuances nested in the health care in correctional facilities in the United States. This yearlong project culminates in an honors thesis in the Department of Medicine, Science, and the Humanities (MSH) and poster presentations at conferences. The American Prison Writing Archive is a collection of thousands of first-hand experiences from the perspective of incarcerated people, in the form of essays, poems, and other literary pursuits.

Mentors: Soha Bayoumi and Stuart Schrader

Naina Gupta and Raven McCoy

Queer Ekphrasis: Interpreting Queer Community Through Art

Naina Gupta and Raven McCoy’s research project draws inspiration from the tradition of ekphrastic poetry—art created in response to other pieces of art. Focusing on Sheridan Libraries materials related to trans cultural production and visual elements from the Peabody Ballroom Experience, they will investigate the impact of queer art and its role in creating and making visible queer communities. They will produce a series of ekphrastic visual and written art pieces in response to archival materials and display them on a website with contextual information.

Mentors: Alicia Puglionesi and Sian Evans

Khris Pham

Automatons vs. AI: The Search for Replicable Human Thinking

Khris Pham’s project examines the philosophical significance of automatons, a lesser-known technology that heavily propelled Early Modern age enlightenment. Past societal perceptions of automatons and how the technology evolved can provide crucial insights on how the ongoing age of Artificial Intelligence will progress. Pham will utilize various automata-related works such as newspapers, analysis papers, and visual diagrams to draft a final research paper.

Mentors: Bill Egginton and Heidi Herr

Special Collections First-Year Fellows

Noel Da: Across the Burning Sands (2023)

Da is conducting research with the Across the Burning Sands sheet music collection, exploring over 200 years of music, art, architecture, celebrities, and history through the lens of popular music. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 spurred a flurry of fascination with Middle Eastern history, culture, and art. Even before this discovery, the United States had an unyielding obsession with the Middle East and Asia, featuring exoticized images of its geography, people, and architecture in popular culture. Since television and cinema hadn’t yet become widely available, this “Egyptomania,” as it was called, was often expressed in the form of sheet music.

Advisor: Sam Bessen

Maneeza Khan: Investigating Early Student Records (2023)

Khan is researching the history of undergraduate student admissions at Hopkins, focusing on student files from 1876 to 1943 in the records of the Office of the Registrar (RG-13-010). The files shed light on university applications and admissions requirements, letters of recommendation, and data collection practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among topics Khan will consider are the ways admissions requirements changed over time, what information applicants volunteered about themselves, and what achievements, experiences, and backgrounds the University most valued.

Advisor: Brooke Shilling

Clare Levine: Activist Cooking (2023)

Levine is analyzing the intersection of cooking and activism through the lens of vegetarianism. Focusing on Special Collections’ recently acquired vegetarian cookbooks spanning over 100 years of culinary activism, Levine’s research will examine how vegetarian activists promoted their quests for social justice, animal and food reform, and even commune fellowship through the publication of recipe and back-to-nature lifestyle books.

Advisor: Heidi Herr

Virankha Peter: It’s Greek (or Latin or Spanish or Italian) to Me

Virankha is exploring the humanities and engineering aspects of classical Latin, translating a host of texts on a variety of subjects that have never been rendered into English. The author Italo Calvino once called the translator his “most important ally” who “introduce[d] [him] to the world.” By translating hitherto untranslated works in Latin held in Special Collections at Johns Hopkins University, Peter will introduce readers to the world and be introduced to the libraries at Hopkins in turn.

Advisor: Mackenzie Zalin

Fomer Postdoctoral Fellows

Jo Giardini

Postdoctoral fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2022-24)

Giardini pursued research on the closure of Johns Hopkins’ Gender Identity Clinic in the late 1970s. They taught for the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and worked on library collections development related to queer and trans literary history.

Spencer Hupp