Eisenberg Institute Names 2025-26 Fellows

2025-26 Faculty Fellowship

Anna Bonnell Freidin
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan

During her Eisenberg fellowship, Professor Freidin will complete an article on wet nursing as foodwork in Roman culture and undertake another project about experimental archeology and synaesthesia as ways to connect with ancient pasts.

Kira Thurman
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan

During her Eisenberg fellowship, Professor Thurman will begin constructing her second monograph, on Black Europe, disco, and decolonization. Currently called "Pop after Empire," this project explores how after WWII and the collapse of European imperialism, popular music industries in western Europe became dependent on the musical labor of former colonial subjects to reinvent itself in an increasingly global and English-speaking marketplace.

2025-26 Emeritus Faculty Fellowship

Rudolf Mrázek
Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Michigan

Professor Emeritus Mrázek will use the EIHS support to work on the Indonesian version of his “Amir Sjarifoeddin: Politics and Truth in Indonesia, 1907- 1948” (Cornell in 2024), to be published in Jakarta in 2005, and to finish a companion biography “Passing of Indonesian Revolution, 1907-1997,” to be published in 2026.

2025-26 Residency Research Fellowship

Matthew Bahar
Associate Professor, Department of History, Oberlin College

Professor Bahar will be working on his next monograph project, “American Discovery: Natives, Newcomers, and Missing Persons in the Early Southeast.” The project explores the experiences of diverse European, African, and Indigenous people who went missing in a new world during the first three centuries of European exploration and settlement.

Casey M. Stark
Associate Teaching Professor, Department of History, Bowling Green State University

Professor Stark will examine the priesthood of the goddess Vesta in fourth century CE Rome. She aims to answer why priests of Vesta appeared and who they were using epigraphic evidence and prosopography. This research contributes to her monograph project tracing Vesta’s worship from Emperor Augustus through late antiquity.

2025-26 Postdoctoral Fellowship

Allie Goodman
PhD, History, University of Michigan

As Postdoctoral Fellow, Goodman will prepare her first book manuscript based on her PhD dissertation, tentatively titled, “Incorrigible: Youth and Family Policing at the Dawn of Chicago’s Juvenile Legal System, 1899-1928.” During the fellowship period, she will expand attention to the connection between public schools in Progressive Era Chicago and the interconnected networks of courts, extra-legal arrangements, deterrents, and punitive institutions. 

2025-26 Graduate Student Research Fellowship

Tuğçe Akgül
PhD Candidate, Ancient History, University of Michigan

During the fellowship period, Akgül will continue her dissertation research and work on developing a theoretical framework for studying marginalized communities. Her analysis draws on insights from women’s and gender studies, disability studies, and critical race theory.

Hannah Edwards
PhD Candidate, Ancient History, University of Michigan

Hannah's current research asks: What does it mean to be Macedonian in the Hellenistic and Roman periods? How is this identity formed and represented in the archaeological record?" During this fellowship, Hannah plans on finishing two dissertation chapters, which both incorporate collective identity and cultural memory frameworks. The first chapter analyzes Macedonian iconography in the material record, while the second chapter confronts Macedonian diaspora communities in the ancient world.

Arighna Gupta
PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan

During the fellowship period, Gupta intends to write the fifth chapter of his dissertation and prepare one of his chapters for publication. He will also organize and participate in workshops along with his fellow researchers during the academic year. 

Ismael Pardo
PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan

During his fellowship, Pardo will write two chapters. The first explores a trade of enslaved indigenous peoples from the Huasteca, shifting from local to transatlantic markets. The second examines the arrival of African and Afro-descended enslaved peoples. Both chapters analyze the impact that the environment had on these historical processes.

Simon Rakei
PhD Student, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan

Rakei aims to visit the UK and University of the West Indies archives to develop initial archival and ethnographic scoping exercises in the BVI. He will be following the cast of characters responsible for crafting the International Business Companies Act which exempted foreign companies from tax in the BVI.

Talitha Pam
PhD Candidate, Anthropology and History, University of Michigan

During the fellowship period, Pam will focus on writing three chapters from her dissertation. The chapters explores diaspora responses to conflict through protest and digital activism, the emotional ties to homeland and loss, and how colonial-era legacies continue to shape identity, politics, and religion among Northern Nigerian migrants in Chicago. 

2025-26 Graduate Student Liaison

Albert Cavallaro
PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan

Cavallaro's research this year moves in three directions: first, utilizing a murder investigation he reconstructs a “social” history of archaeology in the 1860s, second, he examines the various actors who first proposed a museum in Tashkent in the 1870s, and finally he traces the Central Asian museum “crisis” of 1910.