Mandel Center for the Humanities

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Mandel Faculty Grants 2026

Research Grants for Faculty

ChaeRan Freeze - "Reimagining Revolution: Epistolary Creativity, Reading Practices, and Queer Imagination in Siberian Exile"

This study examines how Siberian exile and imprisonment turned student radicals into zealous advocates of political terrorism, seeking not only to liberate peasants from poverty but to demolish the autocracy as the defender of the privileged and propertied. Drawing on previously untapped epistolary sources (some in personal archives, some in police files), it focuses specifically on Mikhail Gots, whose family owned the Wissotzky Tea Company, his wife Vera Gassokh, and their tight-knit circle of mainly Jewish exiles called the “Viliuitsy,” best known for their famous, bloody uprising in Iakutsk in 1889. Singled out for “severe punishment as a warning to others,” the Viliuitsy concluded that state violence justified force, but also insisted on deep bonds of care for one another to resist more effectively and, more important, to reaffirm their own humanity in a harsh penal regime. Drawing on feminist carceral studies, this study explores how Russian prisons became sites for intense reading practices, political critique, epistolary creativity, queer imagination, and incubators for reimagining revolution for the folk and for themselves. The epistolary archives illuminate how this carceral education and socialist artel that the Viliuitsy organized in prison, inspired the creation and identity of the new Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, which relied not only on ideology, but practices of intimacy, mutual aid, and tactics of terror, to smash tsarist oppression.

Charlotte Goudge - "Reading Landscape: Co-Producing Knowledge with Regenerative Farmers in Cornwall"

Agricultural landscapes function as cultural archives, holding centuries of accumulated knowledge visible in field boundaries, drainage patterns, and soil composition. This project explores how different ways of "reading" land shape our understanding of its history and its future. By working with regenerative farmers on the Lizard Peninsula, the research integrates multispectral and thermal remote sensing with historical tithe maps and archival cartography. Rather than treating sensor technology solely as a tool for farm productivity, this study asks humanistic questions: What becomes visible when we read land simultaneously as a historical landscape and a contemporary workplace? By placing scientific imagery in dialogue with archival records and farmers' lived experiences, the project examines how knowledge of the land is negotiated, inherited, and imagined.

Michael McGlin - "Reviewing Personal Loans from the God Apollo in Ancient Greece (314-167 BCE)"

My project investigates the intersection of Greek religion and the ancient economy through a case study of the temple of Apollo on the Aegean island of Delos which extended personal loans to individuals during the Hellenistic period (314-167 BCE). My work analyzes the collection of hundreds of loans that are preserved as documents carved onto marble slabs that were erected for display around this temple of Apollo. This project has entered a critical juncture where personal reading and inspection of these documents is necessary: the published versions of many of these texts could not be read with absolute certainty at the time of publication, and many texts have not received new editions since their initial publication over a century ago. Reading these documents on stone takes on even greater importance because the focus of my work is to secure precise readings of loan amounts which directly impact the understanding of the size, scale, and reach of the temple’s lending operations. My project contributes to the greater knowledge of the ancient Greek economy by arguing that religious institutions were a viable pathway for individuals to access financing. This temple’s lending practices allowed all individuals to receive loans regardless of sex, social standing, or citizenship; such practices circumvented traditional restrictions on access to wealth such as personal or familial holdings, proximity to networks to powerful individuals, or civic status. Because Apollo granted a high-volume of small loans, this project challenges the dominant narrative of the driving economic forces in antiquity as great, wealthy families and landowners as opposed to non-elites, foreigners, women, and the impoverished.

Public Humanities Grants for Faculty

Caren Irr - "Meandering through Watershed Histories in the Ware and Swift River Valleys"

I will be visiting several archives in the Amherst area as part of my research into the history of land use in the Swift and Ware River watersheds. This work is the centerpiece of the narrative about the environmental legacy left by industrialization in Massachusetts that I am writing. This project follows a now defunct railroad line, exploring scenes of damage, renewal and migration along the corridor. The sources to be examined in Amherst will allow me to reconstruct the perspectives of individual mill owners and railroad executives, and I will also be consulting oral histories with the French Canadian migrants who formed a major part of the laboring population in this area as well as records of the multilingual immigrant farm families that populated these fertile valleys. These perspectives should all help me explain the most prominent features of the central Massachusetts landscape: the Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs. Built between 1890 and 1940, these reservoirs anchor the water infrastructure of the state, and their construction involved the forced displacement of at least eight established communities and multiple transport routes. They are the result, in short, of an engineered redesign of the landscape that affected the entire bioregion. In the archives, I hope to unearth depictions of the lives--human and non-human--that were sacrificed to urban needs during this massive modernization project.

Shoniqua Roach - "Toward a Black Femme Makerspace, or Curating Joy in Times of Crisis"

Toward a Black Femme Makerspace is an arts-based, abolitionist intervention that centers Black, queer, femme, BIPOC, and LGBTQ artists in a collective process of creative production, study, and care. Drawing on abolitionist scholarship that frames freedom as a generative, world-building practice rather than solely the absence of carceral systems, this project positions artistic experimentation, embodiment, and collective joy as critical infrastructures for social change in moments of crisis.The project will convene a cohort of BIPOC and LGBTQ artists and content creators for a one-week residency in Anchorage, Alaska—an intentionally selected and unexpected geography that disrupts dominant narratives of cultural production and belonging. By relocating artists from familiar contexts of hypervisibility, precarity, and cultural extraction, the makerspace creates the conditions for reflection, risk-taking, and collaborative inquiry outside of market-driven or disciplinary frameworks.