Meet SCUA’s 2025 research fellow cohort!
In the world of academia, and beyond the walls of its institutions, the pursuit of knowledge is a collaborative endeavor that relies on the contributions of curious minds across time and space. At Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), we take pride in fostering this spirit of collaboration, inquiry and research. Today, we are thrilled to announce the newest cohort of research fellows who will be joining us in our mission to explore, preserve and discover scholarly insight.
Our fellowship program attracts researchers from around the globe, spanning various disciplines and fields of study. This year is no exception, as we welcome a fantastic group of individuals whose research promises to enrich our understanding of history, culture, and our very own collections.
Meet our newest research fellows:
Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship
Sam Tegtmeyer is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Glasgow. His work explores how fantasy literature can inherit problematic ideological tropes, which he calls “maggots,” and how authors like Ursula K. Le Guin resist these inherited frameworks. Focusing on Le Guin’s Earthsea series, Tegtmeyer will come to SCUA to study drafts, notes, and illustrations in Le Guin’s archives in order to trace her deliberate efforts to challenge the genre’s dominant Anglo-Saxon, patriarchal traditions—particularly through her choice to center brown-skinned protagonists and her feminist turn in Tehanu. Tegtmeyer hopes that study of Le Guin’s own sketches will aid in developing an understanding of Earthsea as the author saw it and push back against the ways art, covers, and other depictions of the series so often whitewashes the world and its characters. Addressing the issue of whitewashing and other forms of hierarchical erasures and occlusions are central to Tegtmeyer’s research, which aims to uncover strategies that authors use to challenge and subvert Fantasy’s inherited ideological limitations.
Tee A. Corinne Memorial Travel Fellowship
Louise Trano is a master’s student in architecture at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris La Villette. She is interested in exploring the architectural and social dynamics of women’s lands in Southern Oregon with a transdisciplinary approach, intersecting architecture, geography, and history, investigating the construction processes, collaborative labor, and geographic networks that shaped these communities. A key focus is on vernacular architecture—buildings constructed without formal architects—and the role of mutual aid in their creation. Trano aims to challenge the prevailing notion of isolation in lesbian communes by exploring their fluid connections with urban environments and will examine the communities’ pursuit of self-sufficiency and their complex relationship to land ownership, particularly through conflicts with the Bureau of Land Management.
Louise Toth is a PhD candidate in gender studies at Université Bordeaux Montaigne interested in examining how Southern Oregon’s lesbian utopian communities built and expressed their collective identity through visual and literary practices. Her work, developed over three years and shaped by a master’s thesis, focuses on the processes of collective creation, examining how photographic materials and practices can act as evidence of collective authorship and function as a tool for community-building. Toth plans to expand her research to include the written practices of these communities, analyzing fiction, poetry, and essays that capture the lived experiences of the women on the lands. She is particularly interested in unearthing lesser-known or one-time writings, seeking to challenge traditional notions of artistic authorship through highlighting the role of collective creative practices in community-building, contributing to a richer understanding of lesbian utopian history.
James Ingebretsen Memorial Travel Fellowship
Austin Zinkle is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches at the J. David Rosenberg College of Law. His book project, The Kids Were Alt-Right: The Revolutionary Racist Right and the Origins of the White Power Youth Movement, explores the critical role of young people in the development of the twentieth-century White Power movement in the United States. Focusing on the period from the 1960s to the late 1970s, the project examines how youth—defined as individuals from early adolescence to thirty—were instrumental in mobilizing and sustaining radical racist right organizations such as the American Nazi Party, the National Alliance, and the National Socialist Liberation Front. By tracing youth participation in white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, Zinkle’s work challenges existing scholarship by emphasizing youth agency in sustaining extremist ideologies and demonstrating how these movements co-opted leftist social movement strategies for legitimacy. Access to the Keith Stimely collection, as well as periodicals, organizational records, correspondence, and internal communications from youth-centered groups like Viking Youth, the National Youth Alliance, and David Duke’s White Student Union will provide crucial insight into how young people were recruited, organized, and mobilized within these movements, illuminating the central role of youth in building and sustaining the White Power movement, contributing to a broader understanding of the historical roots of the contemporary alt-right.
Martha Thorsland Baker Fellowship
Sanjula Rajat is PhD student in philosophy at the University of Oregon. Their project examines the colonial construction of purity and pollution in India, particularly as it relates to gender, caste, and queerness, tracing how colonial discourses continue to shape contemporary anti-trans and caste-based politics. SCUA’s William C. Smith collection and the Cady Family Missionary papers contain documents on caste, gender, intermarriage, and labor in colonial India, offering insight into how colonial authorities understood and reinforced systems of purity and pollution through racialized and gendered language. Drawing on decolonial feminist theory and archival material, Rajat explores the afterlives of colonial purity discourses and their continued impact on contemporary anti-trans and casteist ideologies in India, ultimately contributing to scholarship on coloniality, caste, and queer and trans politics.
Please join us in congratulating this year’s cohort, and check back for information on their upcoming lectures as part of Archives Uncovered: Insights from SCUA Research Fellows, our virtual lecture series, held monthly on Zoom.
