In partnership with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, Tisch Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Tisch Library Graduate Fellowship in the Arts & Humanities, whose thesis and dissertation research projects make creative use of collections, services, and expertise at Tufts libraries.
Andy Bainbridge (PhD, English)
Andy’s dissertation, Marriage, Murder, Reproach, Revenge: Defining Early English Horror (1580-1620) requires a close reading of archival and primary source texts, including Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Richard Wiseman’s Severall chirurgicall treatises (1676), to unpack the specific social and psychological texture of sixteenth-century trauma, and establish trauma’s clinical connection to the horror genre. This research fellowship will provide Andy with an opportunity to spend time with these primary source materials and gain a better understanding of early clinical approaches to trauma and PTSD.
Sung-Min Kim (PhD, Theatre and Performance Studies)
Sung-Min’s dissertation, Sky Passages: Asian Diasporic Aesthetics of Air Travel examines air travel as an embodied time and space of becoming and unbecoming for Asian diasporic subjectivities. During this research fellowship, Sung-Min will work on a chapter about deportation flights drawing on research, theories, and artists connected to sound art and soundscapes, and continue building on her existing soundscape, Displacement ASMR, as a critical research method and analytical object.
Rhea Dias (MFA, Studio Art)
Rhea’s MFA research project, Staging Embodied Difference: Containment, Closure, and Disability in Children’s Literature, seeks to examine how children’s literature, across both historical and contemporary contexts, constructs norms of embodiment through narrative and visual strategies that moralize vulnerability, individualize suffering, and privilege socially legible forms of difference. During this research fellowship, Rhea will examine Henry Altemus’ 1897 edition of Through the Looking-Glass: and What Alice Found There, putting it in conversation with contemporary disability narratives in children’s publishing.
Anna Scott Powers (MA, Art History)
Anna’s thesis, Shifting Motherly Virtues in Modern Texts and Images, explores images of motherhood from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. By examining contemporary medical treatises and advice manuals created for women, Anna’s thesis will investigate how visual culture reinforces, translates, or challenges the ideals of motherhood found in contemporary literature. During this research fellowship, Anna will examine primary source texts within the advice genre, including Henry Newcome’s The Compleat Mother, or, an Earnest Perswasive to All Mothers (1695), and William Buchan’s Advice to Mothers, on the Subject of Their Own Health (1803).