The Early Research Initiative (ERI) and the Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) at The Center for the Humanities offered 18 doctoral students a $4,000 Summer Public Research Fellowship to conduct research whose main question is driven by public needs and priorities.

PhD candidate Eva Rose Steinberg is a farmer and seedkeeper. Based in North Carolina and Georgia, her work examines how plant breeders and seed savers negotiate diversity, purity, and adapting to climate change. She collaborates with the Heirloom Collard Project, the Utopian Seed Project, and is in the process of learning how to breed peanuts.

PhD candidate Lilianna Quiroa-Crowell studies the spatial experience of urban Indigenous Q’eqchi’ women in the Caribbean banana port city of Puerto Barrios, Guatemala. Her dissertation explores how the organizing and unique spatial epistemologies of these erased women, residing on the invisible urban edges, have unsettling effects on the larger exploitative power dynamics and spatial arrangements that structure daily city life. Her methodology includes participatory photomapping, in which groups of local women drew maps and took photos of their communities, culminating in a public exhibition of these “forgotten spaces” from a local perspective.

Click here to see the call for application for the 2025 competition.