Past Fellows
Lee Ann Custer
History of Art and Architecture
Fellow from 2022-2025
During my fellowship, I completed my book manuscript, Urban Air Modernism: Beyond the Skyscraper Aesthetic in New York, 1880–1940. I published related material in two articles on the artist John Sloan and his engagements with race and urban space in New York City in American Art and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. I developed and taught new courses in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, including Art, Race, and Urban Space and Art and the Environment in the United States. I also spearheaded Vanderbilt’s membership as a consortium campus to the Urban Humanities Network (UHN)—an emerging professional organization that unites universities, practitioners, and researchers dedicated to interdisciplinary study within the urban humanities, and co-led UHN’s second global (Un)Conference hosted by Washington University in St. Louis.
Eric Moses Gurevitch
History of Science, Harvard University
Fellow from 2022-2025
As a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, Gurevitch worked on transforming his dissertation into a monograph for publication. He actively contributed to programing in the environmental humanities and Science and Technology Studies at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the humanities. And he taught courses in the Asian Studies Department and the History Department.
Anna Hill
English, Clemson University
Fellow from 2023-2025
Anna Hill (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in English from Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature of the United States, with a particular emphasis on environmental criticism, memory studies, postcolonial/decolonial studies, and affect theory. Her current book project explores how late-twentieth-century authors reworked major genres of the American novel and tropes of environmental writing in light of emergent discourses about environmental crisis and global climate change. This project makes the case that, as a dynamic vehicle of place-based, more-than-human memory, the realist novel offers a generative resource for environmental imagining and environmental justice in the Anthropocene.
Elvira Aballí Morell
University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies
Fellow from 2022-2024
Lara Lookabaugh
Librarian & Curator for Latin American, Iberian, & Latinx Studies, Vanderbilt University
Fellow from 2023-2024
While a CHPP fellow, I worked on several publications and collaborative endeavors including an accepted article entitled “Elsewhen Among the Elderberries: Gendered infrastructures of home and migration in a Mam Maya town” in Environment & Planning D: Society & Space and “Mapping Karen Parker’s Journal: Student archival interpretation as feminist geographic worldmaking pedagogy” with Banu Gökarıksel and Sarah Carrier in Journal of Historical Geography, 88 (June 2025): 146-156. My editorial collective, Desirable Futures, published two special issues and prepared an edited volume for the University of Georgia Press: About Time: The Politics and Poetics of Desirable Futures.
Since leaving the CHPP program, I am still working on my research projects. My collaborative book project is now under review with advanced contract with UGA, and I have recently submitted a photo essay for you are here: the journal of creative geography that was coauthored with my research collaborators in Guatemala. As the Librarian and Curator for Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Studies at Vanderbilt Libraries, I teach classes around information literacy, finding and selecting sources for Latin American Studies, and ethics and politics of archives and citation practices. I also curate the library’s book and manuscript collections in these areas, collaborating with our vendors from across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula to select materials to support teaching and research interests at Vanderbilt.
Lidiana de Moraes
School
Ana Luiza Morais Soares
Department of Africana, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous Studies, Federal University of Ouro Petro, Brazil
Fellow from 2022-2025
During my CHPP fellowship, I worked on the project Invisible Urbanisms: Indigenous Urban Experiences, which examined the historical and contemporary presence of Indigenous peoples in urban spaces, challenging narratives that render them invisible or “out of place.” Drawing on my training as a historical anthropologist, I focused on how processes of Indigenous child separation and labor exploitation in the Brazilian Amazon contributed to long-term forms of ethnic erasure that continue to shape urban Indigenous experiences today. The project also explored how Indigenous communities are using digital and social media platforms to reclaim visibility, assert belonging, and rearticulate Indigenous identities within modern urban and digital landscapes.
I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous Studies at the Federal University of Ouro Preto. In this role, I am developing my book project, Kunhãtãi Nation: Indigenous Children in the Amazon, advising undergraduate and graduate students, and coordinating research initiatives focused on Indigenous history in Minas Gerais, Brazil, supported by national and international grants.
Laboratório de Pesquisa Caminhos Indígenas
James Pilgrim
Art History, University of Illinois
Fellow from 2022-2023
I was fortunate to be part of the initial cohort of NEH fellows at Vanderbilt. I divided my time between teaching, organizing programs for the environmental humanities cluster overseen by Prof. Teresa Goddu, and my own research.
My first book, Pastoral’s End: Art, Ecology, and Catastrophe in Renaissance Italy, which was my main research focus while at Vanderbilt, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the summer of 2026.
Matthew Plishka
Environmental History/Humanities, Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Amherst College
Fellow from 2022 to 2025
During my time at Vanderbilt, I developed my book project Battling Banana Blight, which is now under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press’ Flows, Exchanges, and Migrations series. The book tells the story of how ecological crisis, in the form of the banana-crop-killing fungus known as Panama Disease, reshaped agricultural modernization in late-Colonial Jamaica (1910-1960). As part of my work at Vanderbilt, I published several articles on the topic, which can be found in Agricultural History, Environment and History, and Arcadia. I also developed several courses including History of Environmental Law and Environmental Justice in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Jesús Ruiz
Caribbean & Latin American Studies & History, Vanderbilt University
Fellow from 2022-2024
During my CHPP fellowship, I primarily focused on developing a book proposal that has since evolved into my first scholarly monograph, now under contract with Harvard University Press. The project—The Black Royalists: Haiti and A Politics of Freedom in the Atlantic World—examines how Afro-Catholic royalism shaped the revolutionary politics of Haiti’s revolutionaries. In addition, I designed new courses on Migration and Borders that allowed me to begin refining the questions guiding my second research project, a hybrid and interdisciplinary exploration of three generations of U.S. immigration enforcement history, informed by my experience as a former Asylum Officer for the federal government.
Since completing the fellowship, I’ve been fortunate to continue expanding both my scholarly and community work. I was appointed Faculty Head of Moore College (2025) and Assistant Professor of the Practice in Caribbean Studies at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (2024), with an affiliation in the Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership. My article, “Freedom, Faith & Sovereignty: The 1796 Boca Nigua Revolt as an Afro-Catholic Royalist Rebellion,” was published in Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies (Vol. 46, No. 1). I also received several institutional grants, including the Provost’s Faculty Grant for Voices of Belonging: Latinx Student Experiences at Vanderbilt and the Big Questions and Community Engagement Collaboration Funds for Caribbean Week: Bridging Cultures, Celebrating Diasporas, and Inspiring Connections. This provided funding for the inaugural Caribbean Week at Vanderbilt University, and for which I direct a newly approved Caribbean Studies Minor in the College of Arts & Sciences. In 2024, I was honored with the Maestrx Award for Outstanding Faculty Support of Latinx Students.
Anna Tybinko
Colby College, Department of Spanish
Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Dr. Anna Tybinko was the John Hope Franklin Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Franklin Humanities Institute’s From Slavery to Freedom Lab at Duke University where she also received her doctorate in Romance Studies. She specializes in Migration and Border Studies in the Iberian world. Her research on questions of race, racialization, and “bordering” in Spanish cities has been supported by the National Endowments for Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies. She has published in Studies in Twentieth and Twentieth Century Literatures, contributed essays to the edited collections Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America (Routledge, 2022) and Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (Manchester University Press, 2022), is co-editor of Migrant Frontiers: Race and Mobility in the Luso-Hispanic World (Liverpool University Press 2023), and is developing her monograph, Urban Borderlands: Contesting Racial Boundaries in Contemporary Spain.