Recipients of the AY26-27 Faculty Grants Program: Advancing Research Fellowships
Natalia Aguilar Vasquez, Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing, and Chris Lee, Assistant Professor in the Department Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies, have named as recipients of the inaugural Faculty Grants Program: Advancing Research Fellowships competition.
Advancing Research Fellowships support full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members with significant scholarly or creative projects already in progress and beyond the development stage. The award provides one course release, offering eligible faculty members dedicated time to make progress on substantial works that make significant contributions to their fields. Applications are reviewed by the Provost’s Council, which makes recommendations to the Provost for final selection.
Natalia Aguilar Vasquez, Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing, is working towards finalizing her first book, Housing Futures: Colombian Narratives of Domestic Reclamation. The book examines how Colombian literature addresses uninhabitable housing and the creative strategies individuals develop to reclaim domestic space under social, economic, and political precarity. Professor Aguilar Vasquez will use a course release in the Spring of 2027 to complete the final chapter and conduct comprehensive revisions to prepare the manuscript for submission to the press. An interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts, her research on literature and its intersections with domestic and social issues has appeared in Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and the anthology Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (University of Florida Press, 2020).
Chris Lee, Assistant Professor in the Department Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies, will utilize a course release in the Fall of 2026 to advance work on their book project, Asian Haters: Tracing Racial Animus in Media, Culture, and Politics. Their manuscript covers the history of racism and government-sanctioned force against Asian Americans, and examines how Asian American aesthetic and political formations document Asians as both targets of and purveyors of racial animus. Professor Lee has presented portions of the first two chapters in journals and research talks, and they will use the time afforded by the fellowship to finalize these chapters. Their research interests include transnational Asian American studies, trans/queer of color critique, and critical prison and carceral studies; they have been published in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, Women & Performance, the Transgender Studies Reader Remix (edited by Susan Stryker), and the SAGE Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies.