Who We Are
Leadership
Catherine Chiabaut
Associate Director
Michael Niles
Chief Administrative Office | Voorhies Academic Unit
Faculty Advisory Board
2026-2027 Faculty Research Fellows
The Faculty Research Fellowship (FRF) is our flagship award. It supports ladder-rank faculty who employ humanistic methodology and are at a critical juncture in their research projects. The fellowship supports a course release and interdisciplinary work-in-progress seminar, and culminates in a public showcase.
Between Languages: Heritage Spanish, Translanguaging, and Peer Tutoring in Higher Education
Professor Carando's project is an in-depth look at UC Davis' Heritage Spanish Program (which she directs), as well as its tutors and students, framed by research on language contact, bilingual education, and writing studies. Heritage speakers grow up exposed to a minority language through family or caregivers, but tend to gradually increase their communications in the majority language as they get older and begin school. California is home to 10 million Spanish speakers who learned and use the language at home. Yet, most of them are not able to use Spanish in school, resulting in few opportunities to develop advanced literacy and academic skills in the language. Hispanic enrollment in institutions of higher education is also the fastest growing racial-ethnic group, projected to surpass 4 million by 2026.
UC Davis' Heritage Spanish Program offers a unique model of instruction, consisting of a three-course series coupled with a mandatory peer tutoring component. While there is considerable research on peer tutors in the context of English or foreign language learning, the study of heritage speaker tutor-tutee pairs working on their home language is relatively new. Professor Carando's research seeks to fill important gaps in the research while exploring an innovative model for Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) like UC Davis and others interested in developing supportive services and resources for underrepresented and language minoritized students.
Metabolic Personhood and the Promise of Wellness
Professor Choudhury's book-in-progress, Gut Cultures, examines the obscured relationship between modern conceptions of health in the U.S. and legacies of empire and militarism in eating cultures across North America, Asia, and the Pacific. It argues that twentieth-century U.S. public health policy and scientific knowledge production around diet, metabolism, and fat consumption transformed colonial sensibilities around race and gender into empirical regimes of measurement: data sets on health, eugenics, and evolutionary potential. Drawing on archives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration alongside Asian diasporic literary and artistic works, the book posits that wellness and diet culture become major ideological exports of U.S. empire that produce global consumers whose nutritional and medical decisions become racially coded and gendered.
The Material Ethics of Climate Change
Gas-flaring at well sites is a ubiquitous oil-industry practice across the globe and accounts for 30-40% of anthropogenic emissions of methane gas. Grounded in the environmental humanities, Professor Sawyer's book project interrogates the ethical tensions and material logics conditioning the combustion—as in gas-flaring—associated with resource extraction. The project takes as a launching point a successful 2022 lawsuit by nine Amazonian girls against the Republic of Ecuador to shut down gas-flaring at oil-well sites in their region, which lead the Ecuadorian court to rule that gas-flaring was unconstitutional. Professor Sawyer's work examines how the factors leading to this unprecedented lawsuit extend novel connections between material ethics, law, and climate change and explores how Indigenous and scientific collaborations are shifting how knowledge about gas-flaring (a historically normalized practice) is produced, de-normalized, and made a problem. Specifically, her project seeks to trace how Indigenous cosmologies and chemical philosophies may spur weightier commitments around climate crises, exploring how Indigenous Amazonian perspectives and radical takes on chemistry invite alternative epistemological, societal, and legal avenues for tackling climate change.
Professionalizing Families: Ambiguous Roles in the Indirect Welfare State
Professor Taing's book project examines how the contemporary US welfare state operates indirectly by professionalizing family relationships rather than providing direct services or cash transfers. Drawing on ethnographic research—including archival analysis, participant observation, and interviews with government officials, advocates, and family caregivers across three states—the project traces how contestations over the purposes of welfare funding since the 1980s converged with the neuroscience revolution and state-level preschool campaigns of the 2000s to reveal the distributional effects of the growing “indirect welfare state.” In the context of the Fellowship, Professor Tain will work on a chapter drawing on interviews with grandparent caregivers in the East Bay and Seattle metropolitan areas who receive wages through the Child Care and Development Block Grant program (CCDBG), the largest federal funding source of childcare assistance to low-income families. Building on ethnographic research of the CCDBG program in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, this new chapter develops a typology of caregiving identities that reveals how the US welfare state positions families in ambiguous roles between “aid recipients” and “service providers”—and how caregivers’ primary alignment with one identity or the other shapes the wages and types of government assistance their families receive.
Nautchwork
Nautchwork extends Professor Vajjhala's work on the issue of how non-notated embodied practices circulate and persist into a colonial and postcolonial context through a consideration of five discrete intersections between European and Indian dance traditions. Taken together, these intersections confront ballet’s ostensible acultural status both through an investigation of historical roots as well as of current movement practices. By destabilizing the notion of unmarked European art dance through historical and ethnographic work, Professor Vajjhala's work aims to revise what bodies have been—and can be—balletic. Indeed, the project’s title encapsulates that aim: “nautch” is the anglicization of the Hindi word for dance, while “work” evokes Werktreue, Texttreue, and associated Romantic conceptions of absolute music. The collision of these two words, both already in translation, hints at the book’s transnational and interdisciplinary purview.