Professors Gill-Sadler and Castañeda Selected for National Humanities Center Residencies
April 14, 2025
Randi Gill-Sadler and Vanessa Castañeda were recently selected for summer residencies at the National Humanities Center—a four-week program to give humanities scholars an opportunity to make progress on a current research project or jumpstart a new one.
Castañeda, assistant professor of Afro-Latin American Studies plans to use the residency to finalize her book proposal for her first monograph, which focuses on the cultural politics of baianas de acarajé, aging Afro-Brazilian food street vendors.
Gill-Sadler, an assistant professor in the Africana Studies and English departments, will be working on her book manuscript tentatively titled Diasporic Dissonance: The Archipelagic Circuit of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and U.S. Empire. Her book revisits the Black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s to foreground Black women writers’ attention to U.S. imperial exploits in island and archipelagic geographies. In so doing, she expands the political and geographic significance of Black women’s literature and literary history.
Professors Gill-Sadler and Castañeda will join approximately forty humanities scholars from universities across the country who will work together this summer in the National Humanities Center’s facilities in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. They will be assisted in their work by the Center’s 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’s programs have called it an “intellectual nirvana” 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.
