Fall 2025 IHC Faculty Award Winners

January 23, 2026

The IHC is pleased to announce the results of its Fall 2025 awards competition. Congratulations to the winners of IHC Faculty Collaborative and Fellowship Awards!

FACULTY COLLABORATIVE AWARD
Award of up $2,000 for collaborative research or instructional projects during the next eighteen months

“Ancient Voices, Modern Landscapes: An Environmental Humanities Showcase”
Annie K. Lamar, Classics
Julio Vega-Payne, Classics

This project creates a dual-format environmental humanities showcase (digital and physically displayed) pairing short passages from ancient Mediterranean texts with contemporary environmental media. The PIs will produce 5-7 curated “eco-diptychs” that illuminate how ecological knowledge circulates across time. Each diptych features a brief ancient passage on themes such as agriculture, water scarcity, flood narratives, wildfire, extraction, or environmental transformation, alongside modern material such as wildfire severity maps, sea-level-rise projections, satellite images of drought, photographs of local degradation, or visualized biodiversity and pollution datasets. Each pairing will include a 200-300 word interpretive commentary co-written by the PIs.

“Five Ghosts of a Dead Language”
Andrew Watts, Music
Nina Guo
Edward Kass

In this project, UCSB composer Andrew A. Watts collaborates with Departure Duo (soprano Nina Guo, double bassist Edward Kass) to premiere “Five Ghosts of a Dead Language,” five microludes interpreting Linear A inscriptions from Minoan artifacts (1800-1450 BCE). This undeciphered script offers only visual forms and hypothetical sounds, creating unique compositional opportunities. Drawing on Kurtág’s miniature aesthetic and contemporary linguistic scholarship, the project develops methods for translating archaeological symbols into musical material without semantic mediation. The April 2026 residency includes intensive rehearsals, a CCS lecture-recital on collaborative processes and extended techniques, and public premiere, followed by California tour performances.

FACULTY FELLOWSHIPS
One-quarter teaching release to concentrate on research projects in the 2025-26 academic year

Jessica Lopez Espino, Sociology: “Hearing Child Welfare”
Hearing Child Welfare interrogates how laws, institutional policies, and discursive practices perpetuate the recurring devaluation of Mexican and Central American parents in the United States and their rights to family integrity. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research in a California dependency court, this work highlights how cultural and linguistic practices propagate institutionalized views of racialized families as units of risk and in need of surveillance. Hearing Child Welfare theorizes how legal institutions “re-hear” parents and their cases as sites of risk and examines the voices, documents, and interactions that define what child welfare means in legal practice today.

Stephan Miescher, History: “Ghana’s Inland Ocean: Ecologies and Infrastructures of the Volta Lake”
“Ghana’s Inland Ocean” explores the changing ecology, scientific knowledge production, fishing industry, and transport on Lake Volta. The book shows how a newly independent African country, drawing on resources from international organizations, established research centers to study this manmade lake. It examines how local communities experienced this vast lake, managed its challenges, and remember its opportunities. Although planners envisioned state-operated lake transport, small-scale entrepreneurs took the initiative to provide most crossings. Life on Lake Volta was a coproduction of the Ghanaian state and people who lived along the lake, with the latter playing a pivotal role in shaping the outcomes.

Xiaowei Zheng, History: “Demystifying Modern Chinese Political Discourse: Understanding ‘Democracy,’ ‘Constitutionalism’ and ‘Autocracy’ in Modern China”
This project aims to historicize and complicate our common, undoubtedly Eurocentric understanding of modern political discourse by exploring how its major concepts including “democracy,” “autocracy,” and “constitutionalism” came to attain “Sinicized” meanings through translation and localization.

Learn more about IHC funding opportunities