Habitat Fellows

Paul Buchholz is an Associate Professor of German Studies at Emory University. His research focuses on modern European literature and print culture, with an interest in how literary writing renders inhabited scenes of social life and solitude. During his fellowship year, Buchholz will complete the manuscript of Subterranean Future: The Ecological Cliff and Europe’s Underground Press after 1968.

Lydia Fort is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Emory University, award-winning director, environmental humanities scholar, and Faculty Director of the Piedmont Project. During her Fox Fellowship year, Fort will develop and test "Kinship Dramaturgy," an original framework that reimagines theatre-making as a practice of ecological belonging, reciprocal care, and multispecies relationship. 

Harshita Kamath is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor of Telugu Culture, Literature and History. Her research focuses on textual and performance traditions of the South Indian language of Telugu. As a Fox Center Faculty Fellow, Dr. Kamath will complete her monograph, Sanitizing the Erotic: Love and Devotion in South India, which traces the relationship between eroticism (śṛṅgāra) and devotion (bhakti) in the short lyrical poems of the Telugu poets Tāḷḷapaka Annamayya and Kṣetrayya. 

Roxani Margariti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies. Her research interests include Middle Eastern social and economic history, Indian Ocean history and historiography, maritime history and archaeology, material culture, and urban studies. Her project for the FCHI fellowship year is a monograph on the history of the Dahlak archipelago in the Red Sea in medieval and early modern times, offering a case study of a “maritory.”

Geovani Ramírez is an Assistant Professor of twentieth and twenty-first century Chicanx/Latinx literature and culture in Emory University’s Department of English. He specializes in ecocriticism and medical/health humanities. His first book project, The Burning Question of Labor, traces how poor working regulations, anti-immigrant legislation, and lax environmental policies harm and/or disable Latinx people

Yanni Loukissas is an Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. With an interdisciplinary background in architecture, computing, and ethnography, Loukissas brings a spatial perspective to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on data and AI. During his fellowship year, Loukissas will focus on completing a new monograph, Points of Orientation: An Experiential Theory of Data. 

Cristian Padilla Romero is an Assistant Professor of Atlantic World History at Mercer University. During his fellowship year, Padilla Romero will research and draft a new chapter for his book project, which traces the struggles of Garifuna and Afro-Caribbean leaders in Honduras from the 20th century to the present. 

Kathryn Wilson is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. Her current book project, Between Milltown and Model City: Race, Place, and Memory in Suburban Atlanta, explores how Black and white people imagined, crafted, maintained, and commemorated specific places over the course of the 20th century in two communities located east of the city of Atlanta: Scottdale and Avondale Estates.

Melanie Ball is an architectural historian who examines the political economy of urban housing in the twentieth century United States (PhD, Architectural History, UT Austin, June 2026). During her fellowship year, Ball will expand her dissertation into a book project that analyzes racial liberal attitudes toward factory-built housing as a solution to “crisis” of urban living in the late-twentieth century. 

Yandong Li's work asks how the processes of design, digitization, and standardization have transformed our habitats. His book project, Energy Objects: A Media Theory Inquiry, contends that one must understand media theory to understand energy.

Grace Hayes specializes in 20th century and contemporary poetry, postwar art, and the environmental humanities with a focus on postwar poetry and artist-built environments. Her developing book project, Artist-Built Environments and the Poetics of Everyday Change, examines how post-1945 American poetry facilitates an analysis of artist-built environments which prioritizes the everyday ecological and political processes that shape the sites.

Nathan Goldberg is a PhD candidate at Emory University, specializing in modern and contemporary art and the history of photography. As a Habitat Fellow at the Fox Center, he will be completing his doctoral dissertation on the photography of the New York-based American artist, Zoe Leonard.

Hayley Roy is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History.  Her research interests include the history of imperialism and colonialism, especially in the German context, and healthcare history, particularly the history of nursing. As a Habitat Fellow, Roy will work on her dissertation, “Wild Sisters:’ Volunteer Nurses in German Overseas Colonies (1884 – 1914).”

Anmol Sahni is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Emory University. During his fellowship year, he will work on his dissertation, Warring and Warming Worlds: Postcoloniality, Insurgency, and Ecological Crises in World Literature, which asks what it means to dwell when habitats and homelands are threatened at once by war and climate change.