Professors Gill-Sadler and Casta帽eda Selected for National Humanities Center Residencies
April 14, 2025
Randi Gill-Sadler and Vanessa Casta帽eda were recently selected for summer residencies at the National Humanities Center鈥攁 four-week program to give humanities scholars an opportunity to make progress on a current research project or jumpstart a new one.
I plan to use the residency to finalize my book proposal for my first monograph, which focuses on the cultural politics of baianas de acaraj茅, aging Afro-Brazilian food street vendors.
Assistant Professor of Afro-Latin American Studies
I will be working on my book manuscript tentatively titled Diasporic Dissonance: The Archipelagic Circuit of the Black Women鈥檚 Literary Renaissance and U.S. Empire. My book revisits the Black women鈥檚 literary renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s to foreground Black women writers鈥 attention to U.S. imperial exploits in island and archipelagic geographies. In so doing, I'll expand the political and geographic significance of Black women鈥檚 literature and literary history.
Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and English
Professors Gill-Sadler and Casta帽eda will join approximately forty humanities scholars from universities across the country who will work together this summer in the National Humanities Center鈥檚 facilities in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. They will be assisted in their work by the Center鈥檚 team of librarians who draw on resources from the extensive holdings of surrounding universities as well as collections housed in libraries and archives around the world.
Through this program, faculty from participating institutions are able to experience a concentrated period of supported research in this world-renowned setting. Scholars who have participated in the Center鈥檚 programs have called it an 鈥渋ntellectual nirvana鈥 and have often remarked that the contemplative space and intellectual community provided by the Center contributed significantly to the ultimate quality of their work, which includes over 1,600 published books.
