UNH Today

The UNH Center for the Humanities is proud to be supporting the innovative work of three College of Liberal Arts (COLA) faculty members this academic year. Amy Michael (anthropology) has just completed her semester-long leave advancing a research project that focuses on community memory in response to long-term missing persons cases in rural spaces. This project pilots two nested studies exploring how forensic anthropologists’ work can be relevant to living persons affected by unresolved disappearances. This more advocacy-oriented, human-centered forensic anthropology reaches beyond traditional, more limited work in skeletal biology, foregrounding empathy, community response and social memory-making that may aid in the search for missing persons and reduce harm to the co-victims left behind after a disappearance.

This spring, Mike Alvarez (communication) and Laure Barillas (philosophy/LLC) will embark on their research semesters. Alvarez’s book project will contribute to the understanding of suicidal individuals’ online activities, which can inform treatment paradigms, responsible user experience (UX) design and the larger project of destigmatizing suicide. His book attends to the joint meanings interactionally created by suicide forum users and how these are shaped by the platforms’ technical affordances.

Barillas’ book manuscript, Powerlessness: A Philosophical Exploration, delineates four distinct facets of powerlessness (self-alienation, silencing, helplessness and superfluousness) experienced when some force (such as an accident, illness or grief) disrupts the course of a person’s existence; when structural injustice is so pervasive that resistance seems impossible (as in cases of sexism or racism); when collective agency is required to effect social change (as in the case of climate crisis); or when social roles dictate our ways of being (as in cases of gender roles or racial stereotypes).

Along with these projects, COLA's 2025/2026 Fellows will look at the political exclusion of Indian immigrants awaiting American citizenship and the history of school-based writing in English in the Philippines as a national and global history of race, class and language. Applications for 2026/2027 will be reviewed in the fall of 2025.

Funded by the Center for the Humanities' general endowment and the Ben and Zelma Dorson Endowment in the Humanities, faculty research fellowships provide a semester-long opportunity for junior and tenured faculty to pursue humanities research with no teaching obligations.