Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry

Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry A focal point for the humanities at Emory University, advancing teaching, public engagement, and programming across all humanistic fields.

Interdisciplinary in the best sense of the word, the FCHI serves all those at Emory University and beyond who are interested in the compelling critical, spiritual, aesthetic, moral, and intellectual questions which the humanities address. Outreach to scholars in the Social Sciences, the Sciences, and the Professional Schools at Emory, as well as to the general public, is a vital part of the FCHI's work.

Summer may be in session, but we are still celebrating our 2025-26 Life/Story fellows!⁠⁠This week, we are excited to spo...
05/29/2026

Summer may be in session, but we are still celebrating our 2025-26 Life/Story fellows!⁠
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This week, we are excited to spotlight Faculty Fellow Hwisang Cho. Hwisang is Associate Professor of Korean Studies at Emory University. In this conversation, Hwisang discusses his new book project, the importance of interdisciplinarity, and the benefits of breaking with routine.⁠
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In reflecting on the ways in which the fellowship has helped Hwisang out of his own disciplinary crisis, he had this to say:⁠
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"I think I'm sharpening my position at the disciplinary crossroad in more elegant ways through this fellowship because I appreciate the conversations that I have with the other fellows from different disciplines like anthropology, theology, theater and literature. These conversations help me to communicate in better ways with people across different disciplines. And, in a way, I can free myself from this burden that I have felt as a historian. Now I am trying to write something that is relatable to the informed readers."⁠
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Visit https://bit.ly/4dEL7PT to read Hwisang's full interview.

This week, we're spotlighting Faculty Fellow and Emory Anthropology Assoc. Professor Kristin Phillips ✨⁠⁠During her fell...
05/20/2026

This week, we're spotlighting Faculty Fellow and Emory Anthropology Assoc. Professor Kristin Phillips ✨⁠
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During her fellowship year, Kristin worked on her book project "Light Bills & Black Lives" that examines the ways in which the energy system in Georgia and high electricity bills impact people's abilities to pay their rent, to buy food, to purchase medications, to make homes, and to live a good life.⁠
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On her favorite part of her Fox Fellowship, Kristin shared:⁠
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"I've always loved working at Emory. It's such a stimulating place. I wear a lot of different hats at Emory, and I've loved what all those have helped me to do and to become. But having this time and space here has felt very nurturing in terms of my scholarship and provided me with focus that is really hard to get when you're in the thick of teaching, mentoring, and service. [T]o have this dedicated time has been a unique blessing."⁠
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This spring, Kristin was also awarded a $1 million Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to study the impact of the rapid growth of data centers.

Read more about this special honor: https://news.emory.edu/stories/2026/01/esc_sloan_grant_funds_15-01-2026/story.html
Check out Kristin's full spotlight interview: https://fchi.emory.edu/news-events/news-articles/fellow-focus-kristin.html

📣 Fellowship Application Deadline Extended to June 1st! 📣⁠⁠If you're a rising Emory College senior, there's still time t...
05/18/2026

📣 Fellowship Application Deadline Extended to June 1st! 📣⁠
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If you're a rising Emory College senior, there's still time to apply for the Fox Center's 2026-27 Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellowship! ⁠
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Guided by our "Habitat" theme, we invite students whose honors thesis tackle any of the following: the natural environment; climate change and natural disasters; architecture, housing and urban spaces; rural-urban divides; migration and identity; industrialization, globalization, and technological change 🌱🏭 🌊⁠
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Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellows receive research funding, mentorship from senior fellows, and opportunities to participate in exclusive Fox Center programming. ⁠

Proposals from all humanistic and creative disciplines are welcome, and it is not necessary to have started work on your thesis project.

Learn more: https://fchi.emory.edu/fellowships/ug-fellowship.html
Apply now: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=nPsE4KSwT0K80DImBtXfOCl0gQ5r2z1AuIwaK9PDCgFUNUdZQUNFTDdPQkhZWUJIOU0wTU45N0pOTyQlQCN0PWcu

This week we're spotlighting Undergraduate Honors Fellow and Economics and History double major Daniel Bell 🌟 Daniel's h...
05/13/2026

This week we're spotlighting Undergraduate Honors Fellow and Economics and History double major Daniel Bell 🌟 Daniel's honors thesis project examined the life of Herbert Jenkins, the longest serving police chief in Atlanta's history. ⁠
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On the 2025-26 research theme "Life/Story," Daniel shared: "What I'm trying to extricate, and why I like the “Life/Story” theme so much, is: where does the individual end and the system begin? It's a really useful and necessary question for understanding history. ⁠
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By asking this question, I am hoping to identify which events were the result of [Herbert] Jenkins’ actions versus which events were a natural consequence of the various systems in which he was operating."⁠
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If you're interested in becoming a 2026-27 Undergraduate Honors Fellow, there's still time to apply! The application deadline has been extended to June 1st. ⁠
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Read Daniel's spotlight: https://fchi.emory.edu/news-events/news-articles/fellow-focus-daniel.html
Learn more about the fellowship: https://fchi.emory.edu/fellowships/fellowship-types/ug-fellowship.html

Congratulations to our graduating Undergraduate Honors Fellows! 🎉🎓️ ⁠⁠This past April, the Fox was proud to gather for o...
05/11/2026

Congratulations to our graduating Undergraduate Honors Fellows! 🎉🎓️ ⁠
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This past April, the Fox was proud to gather for our annual Undergraduate Honors Fellows' Colloquium where Fellows presented their thesis projects and participated in three conference-style panels, moderated by Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Jeff Williams and Victoria Bergbauer and Non-Residential Faculty Fellow Héctor Álvarez. ⁠
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The program included:⁠
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* Thiên Nguyễn - “Making Them Known: The Lives of Working First-Generation College Students at an Elite University” ⁠
* Samuel Chao - "Heathen for Heaven: Religion, Race, and Chinese American Relational Redemption in the Chinese Exclusion Era, 1873-1920"⁠
* Anita Osuri - "Uncommon Illness, Unequal Burden: Rare Disease at the Intersections of Identity"⁠
* Abby Brown - “Out of Sight, Out of Mercy: Death Row Through the Eyes of Loved Ones”⁠
* Isabel Buyers - “Memory, Movement, and Identity: Narratives of Neurodegeneration in Latin American Literature and Film” ⁠
* Thora Jordt - “Beyond psychology: Technology and agency in Aelita (1924)”⁠
* Olivia Gilbert - "Screening Obscenity: The Role of Censorship in She Done Him Wrong, Deep Throat, and Showgirls"⁠
* Eunjae Thompson - “The Birth of the No-Body Behind Venus & Meditations on Touch” ⁠
* Daniel Bell - “Public Men in Glass Houses: Herbert Jenkins and the Reformers of the Atlanta Police Department”⁠
* Leo Raykher - “Economics, Espionage, and Exile: the Surveilled life of David Drucker, esq.”⁠
* Kate Richardson - “The Life of Marian Diamond: Biography as Contextualization for the Regression of S*x Equalized Research within Neuroscience” ⁠
* Claire Burkhardt - “Jihadist, Rebel, Statesman? A microhistory of Ahmed al-Sharaa”⁠
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The Fox Center is so proud of everything our Undergraduate Fellows accomplished and we can't wait to see what they achieve next!⁠
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Watch the Colloquium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_z9DJpGKbg&t=3s
Learn about our Fellows' next chapters: https://fchi.emory.edu/news-events/news-articles/lifestory-congrats.html

We're excited to announce that Undergraduate Honors Fellow and History major Leo Raykher has won the 2026 FCHI Undergrad...
05/08/2026

We're excited to announce that Undergraduate Honors Fellow and History major Leo Raykher has won the 2026 FCHI Undergraduate Honors Award! 🌟⁠
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This award recognizes Leo's outstanding work on his thesis project and exemplary engagement in the Undergraduate Honors Fellowship this academic year. On winning the award, Leo shared:⁠
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"I'm so humbled and grateful to have been able to work with not only accomplished but compassionate people this past year at the Fox Center. This award is a culmination of all the time that I spent working on this project, which was deeply personal for me. I'm so honored that Dr. Freeman and the Fox Center team saw that in my work."⁠
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Congratulations, Leo! Read more on our site: https://fchi.emory.edu/news-events/news-articles/fchi-award-raykher.html

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! 💫 This year, the Fox Center continued its support of the “Asi...
05/06/2026

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! 💫 This year, the Fox Center continued its support of the “Asian American Studies in an Age of Authoritarianism” (AASAA) interdisciplinary research hub.

Organized by Prof. Chris Suh, the AASAA hub highlights new research in Asian American Studies and Asian diaspora studies in order to illuminate urgent issues of state violence, transnational networks of resistance and collaboration, and multiracial struggles for democracy.⁠

This spring, the hub culminated in a major conference for scholars of Asian American Studies in the Southeast on the five-year mark of the Atlanta Spa Shootings. Over a dozen scholars from peer institutions presented their research alongside members of the AASAA research hub.⁠
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In his own words, Dr. Suh reflected on the hub’s success: ⁠

“The FCHI research hub played an indispensable role in helping the scholars of Asian American Studies and Asian Diaspora Studies at Emory build community and prepare for the submission of the Asian American Studies minor proposal to the College in Fall 2026.” ⁠
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To learn more about how the Fox supports faculty initiatives, visit our website: https://fchi.emory.edu/index.html

This week, we're spotlighting Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Victoria Bergbauer 🌟 A cultural and social historian of modern ...
05/05/2026

This week, we're spotlighting Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Victoria Bergbauer 🌟 A cultural and social historian of modern Europe and its global entanglements, Victoria received her PhD from Princeton University.⁠
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In this spotlight, Victoria discussed her book project's examination of archival life-stories of those formerly incarcerated and the aspects of the fellowship that have been meaningful to her academic journey:⁠
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"Teaching at Emory has also been an impactful experience for me. This semester I was teaching a seminar that I called “Troublemakers,” which moves week by week through discussing figures labeled unruly, dangerous, incorrigible, wayward and through the buildings built to contain them, from the Panopticon to the Magdalene Laundries. ⁠
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My students have made this course come alive, arriving with sharp questions that led us to have great discussions about modern European history. Between the Fox [Fellows] seminars, the city [of Atlanta], and the classroom, this year has been such a generative one in so many ways."⁠
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Read the full spotlight interview on our site now: https://fchi.emory.edu/news-events/news-articles/fellow-focus-victoria.html

Over the 2025-2026 academic year, the Fox Center was pleased to celebrate eight Emory authors as part of our faculty boo...
05/05/2026

Over the 2025-2026 academic year, the Fox Center was pleased to celebrate eight Emory authors as part of our faculty book launch series. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity, each book launch featured a conversation between the author and a faculty respondent from outside of the author’s academic department. This was followed by a convivial reception in honor of the author’s outstanding achievement.

See the list below for our 2025-2026 authors:

Lynne Huffer (Philosophy), “These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction" (Duke University Press)

Gyanendra Pandey (History), “Men at Home: Imagining Liberation in Colonial and Postcolonial India” (Duke University Press)

Clifton Crais (History), “The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World” (Pan Macmillan)

Aaron Colton (Emory Writing Program), “Writing Through Writer’s Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction” (University of Iowa Press)

Lisa Lee (Art History), “Thomas Hirschorn from Graphic Design to Art” (MIT Press)

Tayari Jones (English), "Kin" (Penguin Random House)⁠

Craig Perry (History), “Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt” (Princeton University Press)

Miriam Udel (German Studies/Tam Institute for Jewish Studies), “Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature” (Princeton University Press)

Congratulations to all of our faculty authors!

If you are an Emory faculty member in the humanities with a book coming out in the next academic year, visit https://bit.ly/4tgxYkv to learn more about how to have your book launched in 2026-2027.

Today, we are spotlighting Visiting Faculty Fellow Shehnaz Haqqani. Shehnaz is an Islamic studies scholar whose areas of...
04/29/2026

Today, we are spotlighting Visiting Faculty Fellow Shehnaz Haqqani.

Shehnaz is an Islamic studies scholar whose areas of expertise include religious authority, Islam and feminism, and contemporary engagements with the Qur'an. In this conversation, Shehnaz discusses her current project on interfaith marriage between Muslim women and non-Muslim partners in the United States. Shehnaz also discusses the role of discipline in her research and how presenting her project early on in the Fox Fellow's seminar helped transform her argument.

“For me, [the Fox fellowship] has not just shaped my research; the whole experience is re-shaping how I want to show up as a scholar and colleague. I really like who I’m becoming because of it, and it’s inspiring me to be more thoughtful and generous in how I engage others’ work. I leave every week so inspired, so encouraged, so excited for research and scholarship.”

Read the full interview at https://bit.ly/4dd4LC2.

We are happy to have you, Shehnaz!

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