The Council’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) welcomes six students to its 2026-27 cohort. IHUM confers a joint doctoral degree to graduate students who are selected through a rigorous application process. Students who join the PhD program become core members of a community focused on interdisciplinary research and exchange. They convene regularly for seminars, salons, lectures, and other events.
The new IHUM Fellows are:
Ari Colston, of the Department of Religion. Her research interests broadly include African American religion, Black geographies, law and religious theory. More particularly, Colston studies the ways law, violence, and urban policy shape the contours of sacred space in the United States, as well as the architectural and spatial practices of Black churches.
Andrea Comair, of the Department of Architecture. Her work examines land-making, infrastructure, and war in the mid to late twentieth century, focusing on how debris, toxicity, and logistical systems are reorganized into built environments. Moving across architectural history, environmental media, and the history of computation, she analyzes how objects, images, and spatial apparatuses both register and produce the conditions of postwar capitalist modernity and its settler colonial formations.
Daisy Couture, of the Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation project focuses on people living and working with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) – a contemporary neurological model of the phenomenon historically known as hysteria – in the UK. Combining ethnography with archival research and analysis of literary and performance works, Couture explores how neuroscientific thinking inflects the conditions of possibility for gendered forms of affliction and the ways people experiment with and inhabit inherited forms.
Luisa Dalla Valle Geisler, of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research brings together archival research on late–20th-century Latin American authors with a creative component that emerges from and works with the archive, reflecting an ambitious and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship.
Victoria McCraven, of the Department of Art & Archaeology. She studies 20th century Black Diasporic art, with a particular interest in African American literature and Black environmental thought. Her dissertation focuses on the New Negro Movement, tracing the life and work of artist and writer Augusta Savage.
Jamie Methven, of the Department of Anthropology. Methven’s research focuses on intimacy within the “cultures of rationality” that have flourished alongside the proliferation of personal mobile technologies, algorithmically-governed digital platforms, and ubiquitous sociobehavioral data collection and analysis.
Graduate students are eligible to apply to IHUM in their third year of graduate study. IHUM students typically spend their fourth year on research and exploration in areas beyond the boundaries of their fundamental disciplinary training. They co-organize a salon event during the fourth or fifth year to showcase their multifaceted work.
