CHR Summer Faculty Funding Award Recipient Talks: Anu Aneja and Jess Hurley

Tuesday, January 20, 2026 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Hybrid- Horizon Hall 6325 and Zoom

Congratulations to these faculty members, who each received a competitive $3,500 CHR research grant to carry out humanities research during summer 2025!

Anu Aneja (Professor, Women and Gender Studies), "Reimagining the maternal: Transnational perspectives"

Project - A revised edition of my co-authored book, Embodying Motherhood: Perspectives from Contemporary India (Aneja & Vaidya, 2016, Yoda-Sage) will be published by Routledge India under a new title. The book examines the place occupied by the maternal body in the context of prevailing motherhood ideologies in India viewed through the interdisciplinary lenses of ancient myth and religious iconography, literature, Bollywood cinema, psychoanalysis and disability studies. The new edition seeks to reach a wider international readership by updating chapters and adding new material from a transnational perspective. The summer CHR funding supported my travel to India to collaborate with my co-author, Dr. Shubhangi Vaidya, on a new final chapter and to discuss revisions to existing material. The new chapter/epilogue, titled "Reimagining the maternal: Transnational perspectives" is envisioned as a transnational dialogue that will extend the discursive mapping of the maternal metaphor across the globe.

Jessica Hurley (Associate Professor, Department of English), "Radioactive Worldmaking in the Nuclear Contact Zone" 

Project- This is the introductory chapter of my book project Nuclear Decolonizations, which analyzes the global manifestations of the U.S. nuclear complex – from power plants to uranium mines to testing sites – as contact zones between American nuclearism and Indigenous communities, revealing a complex and multidirectional relationship in which the U.S. is reshaped by its nuclear experiences abroad even as sites in India, South Africa, the Marshall Islands, and Native North America are transformed by their contact with American nuclear technologies. Using worldmaking as an analytic that spans the conjoined material and aesthetic transformations of the nuclear age, I show how narrative and cultural production became key sites where nuclearization would be both imposed and contested.