The selection committee, chaired by Cogut Institute Director Amanda Anderson and Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty Zachary Sng, included faculty with affiliations to the Departments of Classics, Comparative literature, English, French and Francophone studies, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, and Music.

Shelley Lee is appointed as the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of American Studies, History, and Humanities beginning July 2025 and extending through June 2030. She is also an affiliate of the Urban Studies program. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the histories of immigration, race relations, Asian Americans, and U.S. cities during the 20th century. She is the author of Koreatown, Los Angeles: Race, Immigration, and the American Dream (Stanford University Press, 2022), A New History of Asian America (Routledge, 2013), and Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America (Temple University Press, 2011). Other writings on subjects from college student activism to the Me Too movement in higher ed have been published in online venues such as Ms. Magazine, Inside Higher Ed, and Salon.

Her project theme, “Origins and Afterlives of Ethnic Studies,” foregrounds crucial questions about the role of humanistic liberal education in a multiethnic and multiracial society. Delineating the institutional and scholarly history of Ethnic Studies in the United States from the 1960s to the present, including the many contestations and critiques surrounding its emergence and transformations, the project issues a wide invitation to explore and understand relationships between the university and society, research and politics, and academics and culture.

Tara Nummedal, the John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History, will hold a concurrent appointment as Professor of Humanities beginning July 2027 and extending through June 2032. Her teaching and research have encompassed early modern European history, the history of science, and the digital humanities. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), which won the 2022 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society. With Donna Bilak, she co-edited Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), which won the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History from the American Historical Association. As Faculty Director of the Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship, she has led the conception and development of the Doctoral Certificate in Digital Humanities.

Her project theme, “Familiar Bodies,” will explore questions of embodiment, ontology, and historical methodology, taking as a starting point the embodied spirits that dwelled among humans in 16th- and 17th-century Northern Europe, complicating narratives of disenchantment in the era of the European Reformation and Scientific Revolution. These familiar bodies — dwelling in the interstices between demonology, alchemy, natural history, and biology — expose concepts of generation, (dis)ability, and heritable qualities that have profound stakes for understanding both the early modern period and the renewed interest in ontology within the humanities today.