As a UW System Center of Excellence, C21 prioritizes building a community of scholars to address the pressing issues of our time. Each year, C21 offers fellowships that provide the time, space, and collegial support to generate new knowledge and ideas. C21 centers the humanities in its belief that groundbreaking ideas come from diversity of opinions, disciplines, and experiences.
Please join us in congratulating the 2025-26 Research Fellows:
Sharity Bassett (Assistant Professor, Women’s & Gender Studies) – Dr. Bassett contributes sound Indigenous qualitative and archival research and methodologies and is focused on engaging with difficult stories, fostering empathy, and facilitating productive conversations, which are practices she hypothesizes can lead to deeper understanding and more just, decolonial futures.
Katharine Beutner (Associate Professor, English) – Dr. Beutner’s will devote her research fellowship year to experimenting with eco-writing in the lyric mode to think about what kinds of care this mode might invoke. In addition, she will be completing a revision of the follow-up novel to Killingly, her second novel which won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award from the Wisconsin Writers Awards and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
Kidiocus Carroll (Assistant Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies) – Dr. Carroll plans to research and develop a four-episode podcast that situates Black migration to Milwaukee as a lens for exploring slow care and its impacts. The podcast will highlight how structural forces, and the codes of white civil society that perpetuate harm over time, shape both historical and contemporary realities for Black Milwaukeeans.
Lynn Goerdt (Professor, Human Behavior, Justice & Diversity at UW-Superior) – Dr. Goerdt is working to develop a Well-Being Innovation Lab through the UW Superior’s Pruitt Center for Mindfulness and Well-being. The lab will support changemaking efforts on innovative ideas to address the most challenging barriers to well-being, working across all age groups and geographies, but will prioritize projects that support youth and young adults in Northwest Wisconsin.
Yevgeniya Kaganovich (Professor, Art and Design) – Dr. Kaganovich will continue to focus on fungal networks through material and experimental methods with three frames of focus: 1) a literature review of relevant work, 2) continued experimentation with wild and domesticated fungal materials, 3) field and forest work for sharing these experiences with interested colleagues in various modalities.
Nan Kim (Associate Professor, History) – Dr. Kim’s project explores how Anthropene-centered narratives and interpretations persist as essentially dissenting forms of environmental memory. She is particularly interested in the role of museums and cultural heritage institutions as venues for education and public engagement, which also memorialize the “slow violence” of the nuclear Anthropocene.
Gabriela Nagy (Assistant Professor, Psychology) – Dr. Nagy’s research is centered on improving mental health care access and outcomes, particularly for individuals facing systemic barriers to care. Her research lab investigates the social and structural factors influencing mental health, develops and tests psychosocial interventions, and works to implement effective strategies that enhance care delivery.
We are honored to have these Research Fellows and their work as an integral part of our C21 community.