Interdisciplinary Studies Institute 2025-2026 Call For Application

Faculty will be asked to submit their application through an INFOREADY form here. 

They will provide:

A 350 words Research background and extended bio

A 500 words Project description

A sentence on their intended outcome within the structure of the fellowship

(Optional) Identification of either a graduate student or undergraduate who may be a possible candidate for either a graduate or undergraduate student fellow.

(Optional) A 250 words on possible collaboration and synergies with the student identified

Students will be asked to submit their application through an INFOREADY form here. 

They will provide:

A 150 words background and bio statement

A sentence on their vision of how this fellowship will influence their studies and experience 

(Optional) Identification of a professor they have already spoken to and who is concurrently applying for the fellowship.

Suzanne Bagia is the Head Arts Editor at the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. She’s in her final year of graduate school in UMass Amherst’s MFA program, specializing in prose and studying music history. As a music journalist, she focuses on how music shapes identity, lives, society and the overall meaning that music culture brings to our lives. She has interviewed  major names in the indie music scene and covered major music festivals like Boston Calling, Gov Ball and Lollapalooza. Though her journalism primarily focuses on music, she also writes about culture, creative nonfiction and oral histories.

Project Title: The City and Musical Innovation: How sociopolitical forces of the city develop cultural movements

Jess Dillard-Wright, PhD, MA, RN, FAAN is an associate professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst Elaine Marieb College of Nursing. Jess’ research occupies the intersection where nursing, philosophy, history, and activism meet, informed by feminist science and technology studies. Jess is currently co-editor-in-chief for the journal Nursing Philosophy and a developmental associate editor for Witness.  

Project Title: Remembering and Forgetting

With the ISI fellowship, I consider the intersection between place, care, memory, and forgetting using the Medical College of Georgia’s resurfaced and again disregarded history of practicing grave-robbing, a practice that preyed on the deceased of Augusta, Georgia’s Black community. In reflecting on this history and the stories that we tell, it is clear to me that this is by turns historical work, autoethnographic work, philosophical and theoretical work, situated and contextual work.  

Cameron Fritts is an Undergraduate in his senior year in the Department of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work focuses on Egypto-Aegean contact between the Middle to Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as the production techniques and distribution practices of these two civilizations. In the field, Cameron Fritts has worked at a multitude of Bronze Age sites, including Iklaina Archaeological Project in Pylos and the Kea Archaeological Research Survey. He has also conducted remote work for the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project, as well as acting as Assistant Office Manager for the UMass Dept. of Classics.  

Project

This thesis focuses on depictions of bronze vessels of possible Aegean origins present in private tombs at Sheik Abd el-Quran, in modern-day Luxor, Egypt. Using epigraphical, literary, and archaeological evidence, this work will attempt to support the notion that Aegean and Egyptian populations have had consistent contact and trade between themselves within the early to middle Late Bronze Age. This evidence will be combined with an archaeological analysis of common bronze vessel types of Aegean origin produced during this period: ewers, amphorae, and conical rhyta (Matthäus 1990/1995); as well as an overview of craft-production and economic-distribution spheres of the sixteenth through the fourteenth centuries BCE (Abell 2016, Nakasis, Parkinson, & Galaty 2011, and Clarke 2012). These analyses will provide context for how these vessels could have been created, archaeological comparanda of said vessels, as well as the process of transporting these objects to Egypt. Following this will be a catalogue of the vessels depictions, as well as analyses of their greater archaeological significance, which will reveal a more detailed understanding of how these civilizations conducted trade and commerce during the early Late Bronze Age.  

Nefeli Forni Zervoudaki recently completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her dissertation, Migrant Junctions: Nomospheric Investigations of the Dancefloor in Film and Literature, engages questions of representation in global film and literary studies, with a focus on how gender, sexuality, and identity intersect with migration and legal frameworks, with an emphasis on the intersection of social space and law. She has published on transnational cinema, neocolonialism, and aging in literature and film, in edited volumes and Law & Literature, with forthcoming work in Positions. In addition to her scholarship, she has extensive experience teaching world literature, media, and Spanish and French language courses across UMass, Smith College, and Emerson College. Her curatorial and production work with film festivals and cultural institutions further reflects her commitment to interdisciplinary approaches to culture, politics, and the arts.  

KPC Hudson (D.Arch., Ph.D.) is Lecturer in Building Construction Technology & Architecture. Her research examines biophilic design, architectural history, and the habitation of extreme environments; doctoral work at Bond University investigated Antarctic habitation through a biophilic lens, informing resilient, human-centered design in extreme climates. 

Project Title: Rural In the Urban in the Rural

This project examines how biophilic design—direct and indirect engagement with nature, pattern-based relationships, and human-centered environmental integration—has been woven into Vermont’s urban environment over time. This study engages with vernacular adaptation, population scale, and natural resources as productive forces that reveal alternative logics for inhabiting urban environments. Using systematic archival research (municipal records, maps, newspapers, photographs) and select oral histories, it illustrates patterns of informal greening, adaptive reuse, and domestic biophilia. By recovering historically contingent, uncodified practices, the project offers historically grounded models for resilient, small-scale human-centered urban design that embrace indeterminacy. 

Ragini Jha examines changing property relations that accompanied the transition to colonial rule through a study of the cultural, political, and social meanings of historical ruins in nineteenth-century Delhi. Over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colonial archaeology and antiquarianism became standard features towards mobilizing histories in the service of modern empires. In Delhi, historical sites that had multiple uses came to be understood within modern-colonial imaginaries as ruins in need of conservation, thus constricting their uses as would be appropriate to their new status as monuments. Jha's dissertation makes a study of the changing topographies and property ownership of Delhi through the colonial refashioning of the historical ruin into the “monument” and by locating the emergent imperial commemorative landscape within its material, social, and economic production. More broadly, this work engages with the question of changing political economy and new property regimes around existing heritage sites. 

Trained as both an architect and a biologist, Professor Kanter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at UMass Amherst. His work explores the intersections of urban, infrastructural, and ecological systems, using design to engage their social, environmental, and aesthetic dimensions and to envision more equitable and adaptive futures. Shaped by experience in complex contexts such as Beijing and Los Angeles, he approaches architecture as a critical tool for addressing the intertwined challenges of the Anthropocene, where the built environment both drives carbon emissions and mediates human relationships to ecological systems. Jordan’s current research focuses on water and power infrastructure in Arizona, building on his involvement with the Solar River initiative, which has secured over $2 million in funding and realized the 1.3 MW Casa Blanca solar canal project—the first of its kind in the United States. With support from UMass FRG, SPARC, and the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, this phase expands engagement with public, cooperative, and tribal institutions while deepening inquiry into the entanglements of water, energy, and urban development.

Lysander McCune-Pedit is an undergraduate Architecture and German double major with experience in database design. Having grown up in rural Northampton while spending summers in Berlin and Innsbruck, he has developed a perspective attuned to urban–rural relationships and varied scales of settlement. This background informs an emphasis on integrating diverse ways of knowing and working productively with uncertainty. His interests center on understanding urban environments as dynamic networks, where buildings operate not as fixed geometric objects but as nodes within evolving social, ecological, and infrastructural systems—an approach that prioritizes designing for relationships rather than discrete forms. Through his work with Professor Kanter analyzing infrastructure systems, he aims to explore how architecture can engage indeterminacy by creating interventions that strengthen connections while remaining open to unforeseen change.

Project Title: From Infra- to Inter-structures: Tactics for remapping the relationship between infrastructure and its environment 

Meenakshi Nair is a PhD student in English at UMass. She holds a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from SOAS, University of London, a BA in English and a diploma in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from the Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi.  She is interested in South Asian literature and postcolonial studies, with specific interests in cities and mobility, and multilingualism and literary translation. The languages she works with are English, Hindi and Urdu, and some Malayalam. Meenakshi formerly worked with Women in Security Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP, Delhi). She is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer and has poetry and short fiction published in The Alipore Post, VAYAVYA, and elsewhere.

Dr. Kara Peterman is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering where she runs the Basic Infrastructure Research Group. In the Department, she also serves as the Associate Department Head for Undergraduate Affairs, and is the Lab Director for the Boyle and Brack Structural Testing Facilities. At UMass, Dr. Peterman investigates the intersection of sustainability, strength, and serviceability for civil infrastructural materials and structural systems. She teaches courses in structural systems, steel design, and mechanics. Dr. P is an avid clarinetist and classical music enthusiast, and loves looking at buildings. 

Project Title: Costcos and Quonset huts: constraints beget creativity

Cities face a tension between the need to house people affordably and the costs of doing so at a mass scale. Land is expensive, and developers are not keen to back low-cost/low-income projects. While the global elite demand luxury housing they may only live in for weeks in a year, housing instability abounds, workers commute hours a day, and families live in unsafe conditions. This project explores this tension, and the history of both public housing and pencil towers from a social and structural perspective. Here, we use “pencil towers” to refer not only to structures like 432 Park Avenue (the first pencil tower – a structurally innovative system which achieves high slenderness, enabling large square footage over a small footprint) but all tall buildings built for an elite clientele. While the structural history of buildings like 432 Park Avenue is celebrated and taught, the structural history of public housing is often overlooked. There are reasons for this: with big budgets come envelope pushing innovations and signature skylines. But structural engineering flourishes under extreme constraints. The history and heritage of vernacular structures deserves a pedestal. We aim to provide that by modifying an existing course in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, CEE 444 Unified Structural Design (Unified). Currently, Unified is taught in four modules: arches, light-framed structures, cable-supported structures, and tall buildings, and explores the history, the analysis of, and the design of these structural systems. The current light-framed structures history lectures lack the same rigor as the rest, because these are vernacular structures and their history is yet unwritten. We seek to bring these lectures up to par with the rest of the course, through the lens of the structural history of light-framed public housing projects in cities. Most buildings 6 stories and under are light-framed, as this structural system is most economical for repetitive floorplans, and is quick to build and manufacture. The structural history “story” will be taught via the dichotomy between “buildings for the masses and “buildings for the few.” 

Eric Poehler is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work focuses on Roman urbanism, infrastructure, and architectural history, authoring or co-authoring more than 30 articles and book chapters, as well as the books Pompeii: Art, Industry, and Infrastructure (ed., 2011) and The Traffic Systems of Pompeii (2017).  In the field, Poehler has led research projects in Italy (Pompeii, Tharros) and in Greece (Isthmia). Poehler is also active in the digital humanities, formerly serving as the Director of the Five Colleges Blended Learning and Digital Humanities programs and as Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His major digital project, The Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Project, was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America’s 2018 Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology. This project served as the basis of his latest project, the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project, co-directed with Sebastian Heath and generously funded through the Getty Foundation.   

Project Title: Abandonment Issues: the end of the ancient city of Tharros, Sardinia

Kate Sullivan is a fourth year PhD candidate in Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research aims to develop an understanding of the holistic behavior of adhered steel connections in heavy structural settings. Kate also serves as an assistant coach for the Amherst College Women’s Basketball team, of which she is an alumnus. Kate also enjoys working in her vegetable garden and taking long walks in the woods with her two dogs.  

Project Title: Costcos and Quonset huts: constraints beget creativity

Joseph Wilson is an archaeologist in the Department of Classics. He has worked in North America and Europe, most recently, under the supervision of Anthony Tuck at the Etruscan hillfort of Poggio Civitate in Italy. His research concerns the ancient proliferation of copper metallurgy and projectile weapons technologies since the Bronze Age. Dr Wilson is interested in the role that lethal weapons technologies played in the establishment of new political regimes. More broadly, Dr Wilson studies the role of long-distance technological exchange between continents. In conjunction with students, he is examining the distribution of terra cotta and heavier natural stone slingshot bullets found at Poggio Civitate. Dr Wilson has recently taught courses such as Classics 380 “The Ancient City”, addressing problems related to the origins of the first cities, Classics 270 “Age of Empires”, focusing on the collapse and violent destruction of ancient cities, and Classics 393 “Technology in the Ancient World”.

Ethan Zuckerman is Associate Professor of Public Policy, Information and Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the co-author with Chand Rajendra-Niccoluci of The Field Guide to Social Media (MIT Press, 2026) and two other books. He writes a monthly column on technology for Prospect magazine (UK) and contributes to The Atlantic, Wired (UK and US), the New York Times and New York Review of Books. His scholarship focuses on alternative business and governance models for social media, on different uses of social media platforms across different languages and cultures, and on “unpermissioned” research use to study and audit platform power, including social media and AI tools. Prior to his time at UMass, he led the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. 

Project Title: We Have Always Been An Immigrant City: Pittsfield, MA