Our Current Fellows
Internal Fellows
Anu Ahmed (fall 2026)
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Anu Ahmed is a medical and psychological anthropologist working on questions of gendered and sexual violence, medicine, psychiatry, and moral personhood. The Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship will support the writing of her first book: drawing on person-centered and discursive-centered ethnographic research conducted over 22 cumulative months in the Greater Male’ Region of the Maldives, Ahmed explores how Sunni-Maldivians understand and experience a long-existing cultural category of ill-personhood known as nafsānī bali (lit. ‘self-illness’)—a category of experience that includes subjective distresses such as madness. Her work illuminates how emergent institutions and cultural discourses give shape to new moral and phenomenological worlds in a contemporary moment marked by rapid sociopolitical changes in the recently democratized Republic of Maldives, and highlights the intimate entanglements of politics and inner processes such as emotions, memory, and recovery.
Stefanie Bautista (spring 2027)
Assistant Professor of Archaeology, Religion and Classics
Stefanie Bautista graduated from Stanford University with a M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology, and from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a B.A. in Anthropology. Her research focuses primarily on Andean prehistory, ceramic analysis, prehispanic religion and ritual, and household archaeology. Dr. Bautista is currently co-directing an archaeological project at the monumental center of Antimpampa located in Arequipa, Peru, that focuses on how ritual and domestic practice contributed to making powerful places in the Andes. She is also working on a manuscript entitled, Becoming Paracas: Coalescence on the Ancient Peruvian South Coast, that examines the question of identity formatting using Paracas (850-250 BCE) as a case study.
Philip McHarris (spring 2027)
Assistant Professor, Black Studies
Philip V. McHarris' research focuses on racial inequality, housing, and policing. He is the author of Beyond Policing (Hachette, 2024) and is at work on Brick Dreams, an ethnography surrounding public housing and the New York City Housing Authority, under advanced contract with Princeton University Press. His scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Antipode and the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, and his public writing and commentary have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HBO, CNN, and PBS, among others. McHarris holds a PhD in Sociology and African American Studies from Yale University and was previously a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University.
Ray Qu (fall 2026)
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Ray Qu is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work bridges medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and political anthropology. His current book project is an ethnography of everyday hope for the good life as it is shaped through religious practices in authoritarian China. Qu is a community-engaged scholar who centers storytelling and new forms of digital and public scholarship. Born and raised in a small village in North China, he is currently working on a documentary based on his second book project on aging apple peasants and their experiences living with chronic illness and disability, while also developing his YouTube channel, Melon-Eating Crowd: Telling Human Stories.
External Postdoctoral Fellows
Tp Coughlin
“The Chronotope of Women’s Labor: Womanpower and the Feminist Time-Travel Narrative in the Postwar United States"
Tp Coughlin is a trans studies scholar specializing in trans cultural production, speculative media, and narratology. They are currently completing their Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Davis. Their dissertation offers a formalist prehistory of nonbinary, tracing the speculative reimaginings of gender in science fiction, case law, employment policy, and feminist activism in the post-war United States. This project has been supported by the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship at the University of Oregon and the Ruth Stephan Fellowship at Yale University. Their work is forthcoming in Science Fiction Studies and Utopian Studies. At the University of Rochester, they will begin a new project investigating the role of the voice in contemporary trans media.
Liliya Dashevski
“Toying with Peasants: Creating Russian "Traditional" Toys"
Liliya Dashevski received her PhD from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her research focuses on the play culture of Russian childhood in the long nineteenth century, examining how toys, games, and books shape the construction of childhood, particularly in relation to nation and identity. She is the recipient of the Junior Prize for Outstanding Toy Research from the International Toy Research Association. Alongside her academic work, she is deeply engaged in museum practices and curation. Among other places, she has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, studying paper dolls in the Department of Drawings and Prints, and served as a Curatorial Assistant for the exhibition Dollatry: Playing with Likeness.
External Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities
Peizhen Wu
“Techno-Reciprocity and the Rise of Chinese Cyber-Pop: A Transcultural Digital Humanities Approach"
Peizhen Wu received her Ph.D. in English Literary Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in August 2026. Peizhen’s research bridges Digital Humanities with transnational literary and new media studies. She specializes in using computational methods to study the circulation of popular culture between Western and East Asian contexts by analyzing global science fiction, web novels, fan fiction, and user-generated reviews. She has published in Journal of Digital Humanities, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Tolkien Studies. Peizhen looks forward to advancing her data-driven research and contributing to the critical Digital Humanities community at Rochester.
Arnold and Ann Moore Lisio Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian and/or Mediterranean Cultures, Languages, and Literatures
Federica Parodi
“A Space Within: 1968, Selfhood ad the Politics of Performance"
Federica Parodi received her Ph.D. in the Department of Italian Studies at Yale University, where she founded the Other(ed) Italies Working Group. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Italian literature and culture, with a dissertation on the aesthetic space of protest in 1970s Italy. Her work brings Italian Studies into dialogue with Voice and Sound Studies, Performance Theory, and Postcolonial perspectives. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in il verri, Italian Modern Art, and Forum Italicum. She co-edited the volume Sistema periodico. Il secolo interminabile delle riviste (Pendragon, 2018) and translated Gianluca Rizzo's Poetry on Stage (Marsilio, 2025).