The Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies has awarded twelve fellowships for 2026-27. Recipients will join faculty and graduate students from U-M History and other institutions for a series of lectures, workshops, and symposia. Learn more about the research plans of next year's cohort below.

These fellows join more than 200 others who have earned Eisenberg fellowships since the institute’s inception in 2006. The institute announces its annual fellowship program in December and issues the awards in spring. The faculty and graduate student award terms are July 1 to June 30; the postdoctoral award term is August 31 to August 30; external faculty award terms vary. These awards have been made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

Eisenberg Institute Names 2026-27 Fellows

2026-27 Faculty Fellowship

Anthony P. Mora
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan

During his Eisenberg fellowship, Professor Mora will complete Zorro and the Curse of History. This swashbuckling cultural history follows the masked hero through a century of reinventions, showing how he made American mexicanidad visible, romantic, marketable, and safely contained amid debates about Mexican belonging, national identity, and competing stories about the United States’ past.

Melanie S. Tanielian
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan

During her Eisenberg fellowship, Professor Tanielian will complete her monograph, Scandal and Salvation: German Humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1890–1930, a history of German aid to Armenians. The book studies how humanitarianism became a medium for navigating geopolitical marginality, moral authority, and post-imperial identity. It reframes humanitarianism as an unstable, affectively charged, and historically contingent form of global engagement shaped by scandal, salvation, and the ruins of empire.

2026-27 Residency Research Fellowship

George Milne
Associate Professor, Department of History, Oakland University

Professor Milne will be completing at least one of the two articles on colonialism that are underway. His research interests include historical cartography, the Atlantic World, and European colonial projects during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Rochelle Rojas
Associate Professor, Department of History, Kalamazoo College

Professor Rojas will begin her next project, “Science, Healing, and Ways of Knowing in premodern Costa Rica” which examines the understandings of science, the body, and healing technologies in early Costa Rica. This research contributes to her larger project – a comprehensive history of Costa Rica from its precolonial to Independence periods – which she will begin during her Fulbright Fellowship in Costa Rica in 2027.

2026-27 Postdoctoral Fellowship

Brittany Joyce
PhD, History, University of Michigan

As the EIHS Postdoctoral Fellow, Joyce will prepare a book manuscript based on her PhD dissertation, tentatively titled “Controlling Behavior: Slavery, Religion, and the Household in Late Antiquity.” She will specifically expand research on freed people’s continued relationships with their former enslavers post manumission.

2026-27 Graduate Student Research Fellowship

Lucía González
PhD Student, History, University of Michigan

González plans to conduct research at the Archivo Histórico del Instituto Interamericano del Niño, la Niña y Adolescentes in Montevideo. There, they will continue investigating how girls in the child welfare system renegotiated the physical and emotional demands of care work, and how tensions between care as labor obligation and care as affective practice shaped their experiences renegotiating power, identity, belonging, and survival.

Zhaina Meirkhan
PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan

During the fellowship, Meirkhan intends to broaden her understanding of the literature on nuclear history by conducting research using online archival sources and oral histories with survivors and their descendants in nuclear communities at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.

Markus Merin
PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan

Merin will complete the remaining chapters of his dissertation and submit it for defense. The first chapter will examine Emilia-Romagna as a nodal point of the international left in the 1980s, while the second will cover the Italian Communist Party’s acrimonious dissolution in 1989. 

Deborah Pomeranz
PhD Student, History, University of Michigan

Pomeranz will conduct preliminary research in the transnational and multimedial archives of variety performance, spanning press, police records, visual and material culture, and diaries and memoirs; enabling her to delimit her research questions in preparation for the prospectus.

Maya Sudarkasa
PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan

Sudarkasa plans to continue with the drafting of her dissertation analytical chapters. Her dissertation as a whole aims to map a growing Pan-African discourse in the United States, Greater France, and South Africa through the turn of the twentieth century.

Wanhan Xing
PhD Student, History, University of Michigan

Xing will prepare for preliminary examinations while also developing a dissertation project on decorated letter paper in eleventh-century East Asia. She is excited about the potential of placing this project in dialogue with broader historical contexts – both temporally and geographically speaking – while learning from scholars from different backgrounds at the Eisenberg. 

2026-27 Graduate Student Liaison

Hannah Edwards
PhD Candidate, History, University of Michigan

Hannah Edwards is a seventh-year PhD candidate in Ancient History. Her research focuses on the political and cultural history of Hellenistic and Roman Greece, and she has a special interest in Macedonia. She is interested in conceptions of ancient identity, power, symbols, and nationalism.