The Humanities Center at 黑料正能量 is pleased to announce the 2026 recipients of its Faculty Research Grants. This year’s cohort brings together projects at the intersection of humanities and technology, global media and cultural history, and the study of communication, space, and collective life. Spanning digital platforms, algorithmic systems, memoir, radio history, and architectural research, these projects explore how humans create meaning, navigate complex systems, and shape shared futures in an increasingly interconnected world.
Together, these faculty are advancing research that not only deepens humanistic inquiry but also engages pressing contemporary questions - demonstrating the vital role of the humanities within a research university known for innovation.
These projects represent the kind of bold, interdisciplinary work the Humanities Center is committed to supporting - research that pushes boundaries and speaks to the complexities of our world today.
- Edda Fields-Black, Director, Humanities Center.
Drawing on our scholarly backgrounds in historical and cultural studies of Israel and Palestine, and Arabic and Jewish Studies, we employ ethnographic film and critical food studies as a lens to narrate the fragmentation of Palestinian and Israeli imaginaries along the fault lines of territorial partition and its threats of cultural erasure.
The project evolves from an earlier collaboration on an interactive web-based project: “A Tale of Two Lands” (2022), as well as on co-authored scholarly work on “Culinary Spaces as Sites of National (Re)Imagining in Palestine and Israel” forthcoming in a special issue of the Palestine-Israel Review. Fieldwork conducted in Israel, the West Bank, and London between 2023–2024 generated the core audiovisual material now being re‑edited for the feature, augmented by new interviews to be undertaken in the Palestinian and Israeli diasporas, to reflect the topic’s evolving political and cultural landscape as Israelis and Palestinians are forced to reimagine the meanings of home.
Scaling Cooperative Housing: The Architecture and Ecology of Commons–Public Partnerships examines how cities can expand affordable housing beyond the limits of market provision or state-led models by enabling cooperative housing to prosper and scale. The inquiry approaches housing not merely as an economic and architectural problem, but a cultural and political practice shaped by histories of struggle, self-organization and collective care. Drawing on contemporary commons debates, the research interprets cooperative housing as a site where questions of self-determination, shared ownership, and social meaning are negotiated through space.
At the center of the project is the concept of Commons–Public Partnerships (CPPs): institutional arrangements that support resident-led housing through public frameworks, such as land provisioning, financing, and governance, and constitute an ecology of actors, institutions, and everyday practices.
The project compares case studies across Vienna, Zurich, Montevideo, and New York City and combines archival research, oral histories, interviews, site observation, and spatial analysis to understand how cooperative housing emerges in contexts of crisis and how residents sustain and contest collective life over time. More specifically, this grant supports research and field work on the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) in New York, whose history of homesteading and mutual aid offers a rich record of grassroots responses to abandonment and inequality.
The project argues that CPPs offer not only a viable pathway for scaling affordability, but also a lens for shaping belonging, community resilience, and political agency.
The framework draws on a broad range of scholarship — from Aristotle's rhetoric and Kenneth Burke's dramatism to Halliday's functional grammar, Perelman's argumentation theory, and cognitive science — demonstrating how computational methods can serve humanistic inquiry rather than replace it. By analyzing tens of thousands of language patterns rather than relying on select prototypical examples, the project both tests and extends established theories, exposing gaps in existing literature and revealing new distinctions.
The interactive website format is central to the project's goals: it allows scholars, writing instructors, and professional writers to explore the framework non-linearly, entering through the categories most relevant to their needs. The result is a publicly accessible theoretical foundation that makes rhetorical knowledge teachable and available for future scholars to build upon.
Manuscript commonplace books are personal, handwritten collections of quotes and passages. They serve as windows into the lives of readers, offering insight into both important sociopolitical issues (laws, wars, colonialism) and universal concerns (friendship, love, death).
This project focuses on unpublished examples of eighteenth and nineteenth-century manuscript commonplace books. Because of the sometimes random nature of their composition, one often has to sit and read through them to get a sense of what they contain, a task made all the more difficult due to the need to decipher the compiler’s handwriting. This project aims to use the transcription capabilities of AI to transcribe unpublished commonplace books and build a system for cataloguing and organizing these irregularly formatted texts, allowing for large-scale analysis of their contents.
Drawing on archival recordings, radio magazines, government documents, and oral histories, the book introduces the concept of “sonic dissonance”: the tension between state-driven efforts to control the airwaves and the vibrant, often unpredictable ways musicians, broadcasters, and listeners shaped radio’s meaning. Programming featured figures such as Ahmad Zahir, whose genre-blending music challenged cultural boundaries, alongside pioneering women broadcasters who expanded female participation in public discourse.
Rather than treating Afghanistan as marginal to global media history, this project places it at the center of transnational networks linking socialist, imperial, and postcolonial worlds. In doing so, it shows how sound technologies shaped not only political messaging but also everyday practices of interpretation, resistance, and belonging. The book rethinks global media history by foregrounding Global South listening traffic as a key site of historical analysis.
Archipelago: A Memoir in Islands navigates questions of isolation, immigration, and un/belonging, sailing between my parents’ Jamaica, my young family’s one-time home in Harlem on the island of Manhattan, and the largely white worlds where my Blackness became its own island: Portland, where I grew up; Harvard University, where I attended college; and Belarus, the dictatorship that is my husband’s motherland. Throughout this journey, I examine the historical and social forces that underpin the “islands” that have shaped me, arguing that our lives are not ours alone, but are formed in conversation with the people, systems, histories, and politics around us.
Archipelago will explore how one’s sense of self is shaped by place and nation, questioning if belonging is possible when the histories that have forged us are ever at war. If we leave belonging behind, what form of interconnection could take its place? This project works toward the discovery of a place beyond belonging, one inhabited by the unsettling truths of the forces that built us.
Supporting Innovative Humanities Research
The Faculty Research Grant program supports Carnegie Mellon faculty in developing ambitious projects across disciplines and formats—from books and archival research to digital platforms, film, and other public-facing work. By providing seed funding at critical stages, the program enables scholars to take intellectual risks, expand the reach of their work, and contribute to broader conversations within and beyond the university.
These projects will continue to evolve over the coming year, contributing to new knowledge, creative practice, and public engagement.