The Global Arts + Humanities is proud to announce our 2025-26 Society of Fellows faculty awards. The incoming cohort includes faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences with affiliations in the Departments of English, History, History of Art and Philosophy, from the Columbus and Mansfield campuses. 

These fellowships provide faculty with release time (two-course reduction) to focus on a scholarly and/or creative project that advances the seminar theme. The theme for the 2025-26 Society of Fellows seminar is Creativity | Intelligence | Automation. This thematic focuses on past and present struggles to eradicate oppressive systems and envision more life-affirming and equitable futures.

About the Society of Fellows

Multidisciplinary inquiry is built on the strength of disciplinary foundations and comparative skills. The Society of Fellows fosters a multidisciplinary community of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students that support the synthesis and translation of knowledge across disciplines to engage critical societal challenges in the form of an annual theme.

2025-26 Cohort 

YuHao Chen
External Fellow
Chen's research interests and expertise are in sound writing, material culture, archival sensing and disability media studies. His post-doctoral research project, Wax to Word: Tracing Sino-phonographic Voice, offers a critical historical lens on contemporary AI-generated voice automation by examining a pivotal moment in the late-nineteenth century when spoken voice was being mechanically captured through both phonetic writing systems and the phonograph. Chen’s project focuses on how early automation and automatic writing technologies challenged and reduced the boundaries between human and machine intelligence in the context of capturing and reproducing Chinese spoken sounds.

Associate Professor Jennifer Eaglin
Department of History
Eaglin’s research focuses on alternative energy development in Brazil. Her first book, Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford UP 2022), looked at the history of Brazil’s sugar-ethanol industry. Her current project focuses on the environmental connections to the development of Brazil’s nuclear energy industry. Her work on nuclear energy has been published in scholarly journals and public forums, including Environment and History and The Brazilian Report.

Associate Professor Merrill Kaplan
Departments of English, and Germanic Languages and Literatures
Kaplan writes about medieval Scandinavian literature, Norse mythology and traditional narrative and folk belief about the supernatural. She is interested in the affordances of different media for the communication of expressive culture, and she has published about the odd workings of folklore in online environments. Her current project for 2024-25 concerns the significance of LLM AI technologies for folklorists’ understanding of what we do as scholars of tradition.

Associate Professor Jamison Kantor
Department of English (Mansfield campus)
Kantor focuses on Romantic literature and the black diaspora in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is interested in literary depictions of materialism and their relationship to modern political movements like Marxism, Liberalism and Conservatism. Kantor also writes about popular film, its politics and genres. His recent essays and reviews have been featured in Critical Inquiry, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Jump Cut, and PMLA. 

Associate Professor Eden Lin
Department of Philosophy
Lin’s area of specialization is ethics. Much of his research focuses on welfare or well-being – what kind of life qualifies as a life that is going well for the person living it. He also has an interest in the risks to humanity posed by advanced forms of Artificial Intelligence. His work has appeared in journals such as Ethics, Noûs, The Philosophical Review, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
 

Associate Professor Kris Paulsen
Leadership Faculty Fellow
Department of History of Art
Paulsen is a specialist in contemporary art, with a focus on time-based and computational media. Her work traces the intersections of art and engineering, with a particular emphasis on telepresence, virtuality and Artificial Intelligence. Her current book project, Future Artifacts, examines how contemporary artists strategically deploy the emergent technologies and science-fiction fantasies that fuel capitalist speculation to redress Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian promises.