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.

Savannah G.M. Wood

Savannah G.M. Wood is an artist with deep roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles. For her Tabb Center Public Humanities fellowship, she will expand her research for Hard to Get and Dear Paid For, a speculative documentary currently in production. The film traces seven generations of Wood’s family, from their enslavement in Montgomery County, Maryland to their emergence as entrepreneurs and civic leaders in Baltimore and Ontario, Canada. Drawing on institutional archives, oral histories, and contemporary scholarship, the film explores complex themes of enslavement along the then-north/south border of the US, inheritance, and Black entrepreneurship in post-emancipation Maryland.

Wood is the Executive Director of Afro Charities, where she working to increase access to the 130+-year-old AFRO American Newspapers’ archives. Like four generations of ancestors before her, she lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, sharing and preserving Black stories.

Isabella Gwin

Past & Present Editions of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

This project investigates the publishing history of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, focusing on the decision to release them together or separately. By comparing various editions, including covers, prefaces, and illustrations from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, Isabella Gwin aims to explore how publishers shape our understanding of these novels through different paratextual aspects of new editions. She will discuss these findings in a research paper.

Mentor: Mary Favret

Kellen Hunnicutt

Where Springtime Isn’t Rare

This project culminates with a collection of speculative non-fiction short stories about queer people of the past. Kellen Hunnicutt will conduct archival research to find remnants of queer people’s lives, learn about queer life in a particular location and decade, and write stories that speculatively describe what their lives may have been like. Using spring as a metaphor for joy and freedom, the stories will explore where and with whom “springtime isn’t rare.”

Mentors: Heidi Herr and Joseph Plaster

Yvette Shu

Examining the Marketing Strategies of Roland Park Company

This project explores how the Roland Park Company used marketing to shape Baltimore’s landscape, particularly targeting wealthy white families. While much has been written about the Roland Park Company’s legal and political role in segregation, less attention has been given to its advertising tactics. By analyzing magazines in the RPC Records from 1893-1929, Yvette Shu will explore how the their branding strategy reinforced segregation.

Mentors: Brooke Shilling and Michael Bader

Riya Kumar

Hopkins’ Interdisciplinary Rhetorics of Race & Reproduction

Riya Kumar will engage with notable faculty’s correspondences, diaries, and unpublished works in Special Collections and the Institute for the History of Medicine to reconstruct Hopkins’ Progressive Era scholarship regarding race and reproduction, investigating how classical and medical rhetoric reinforce each other. Her outcomes include a peer-reviewed research paper for publication, a public history for online exhibition, and an eventual honors thesis.

Mentors: Nandini Pandey and Michael Seminara

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

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

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

Hupp acted as an assistant liaison between the Writing Seminars and Sheridan Libraries. He worked with Heidi Herr to tailor a collection of manuscripts, literary artifacts, and reference items to the needs of Writing Seminars undergraduates and MFA candidates.