NEWS
SOLIDARITY STATEMENT
​
The Franke Institute for the Humanities has worked with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes to draft a statement of solidarity with Black Lives Matter and related movements around the world. We post it here on behalf of CHCI and as a declaration of the Institute’s own values and commitments: Solidarity Statement.
For more on the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and this statement, please see CHCI's website.
​
Franke Residential Fellowship Recipients, 2024-25
On behalf of the Governing Board of the Franke Institute, we are delighted to announce the 2024-25 Franke Faculty Residential Fellows:
Ariel Fox
Associate Professor, East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Reading Money in Early Modern China
Edgar Garcia
Associate Professor, English Language & Literature
Migrant Lots
Pauline Goul
Assistant Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures
The Problem of Waste in Early Modern France: Sustainability, Literature, and the New World
​
Emily Kern
Assistant Professor, History
Selective Histories: Science, Race, and the Search for the Cradle of Humankind
Jana Matuszak
Assistant Professor, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations
Sumerian Mock Hymns: Parodying Songs of Praise
John Proios
Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Freeing the Mind: Plato on Psychological Liberation
​
Mee-Ju Ro
Assistant Professor, English Language & Literature
Entangled Testimonies: Technologies of Subjectivity in Asian American Women's Writing
Melissa Van Wyk
Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Staging the Wonderous: Mechanics, Spectacle, and Media in Early Modern Kabuki
On behalf of the Governing Board of the Franke Institute, we are delighted to announce the 2024-25 Franke Dissertation Completion Residential Fellows:
​
Jacob Biel
Doctoral Fellow, English Language & Literature
The Gift of Dependence: Charity, Agency, and Character in the Long Eighteenth Century
Adam Fales
Doctoral Fellow, English Language & Literature
Inheriting the Future: Narrative and the Past in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Ronit Ghosh
Doctoral Fellow, South Asian Languages & Civilizations and Music
Unheard Melodies: Entangled Pasts of Studio-born Bengali Song (1931-70)
Jennifer Jenson
Doctoral Fellow, Germanic Studies
Un/weaving Germany: A Cultural History of Textiles in Art and Literature, 1970-1999
The 2022-23 Franke Bulletin
The Franke Bulletin newsletter for 2022-23 is available to view or download at the top of the Newsletters page.
Humanities Without Walls Consortium, 2023
​
As a member of the HWW Consortium, the Franke Institute is delighted to congratulate Professor Na'ama Rokem, and the Bronzeville Historical Society, for their three-year award of $150,000 for "Studying Oak Woods" from the Humanities Without Walls Consortium (HWW), provided by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The HWW Consortium is headquartered at the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“Studying Oak Woods”
PI: Na’ama Rokem, University of Chicago
This project supports the documentation and preservation work done by the Bronzeville Historical Society at Oak Woods Cemetery, a historic site located in Woodlawn, Chicago. The primary focus is on the notable African Americans buried at this site, and on the social and cultural contexts that it is embedded in. Through research, public programing, teaching, and documentation, we aim to create new knowledge and increase public interest in this important site.
More about: HWW's final Grand Research Challenge
In Memoriam​
The Franke Institute for the Humanities mourns the loss of
​
RICHARD J. FRANKE
23 June 1931 - 15 April 2022
​
Rich was a visionary, a supporter of humanistic research, teaching and engagement at every level—and, with his wife Barbara, the warmest of friends. We are honored to bear his name and inspired to carry forward his ideals, now more than ever:
​
“We need to make the humanities available not merely for survival in an increasingly commercial world, but for the sake of democracy.”
​