CAMPSSAH Faculty Scholars Receive DHI Research Fellowships

CAMPSSAH Faculty Scholars Kathleen Cruz, Natalia Duong, and Zinzi Clemmons received the DHI Research Fellowships. The 2025 Faculty Research Fellowship cohort also includes Lilia Soto, whose project examines the experiences of Latinx women in Napa’s wine industry, and Julietta Hua, who studies how insurance and financies shape immigrant labor and life.

Kathleen Cruz

Assistant Professor, Department of Classics
Project: Competing Visions: Classical Antiquity and Puerto Rican Identity in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Cruz’s research investigates how 19th- and 20th-century Puerto Rican intellectuals engaged with Greco-Roman antiquity to shape ideas of national identity and belonging under colonial rule. Her book project examines how classical references became tools to debate Puerto Rico’s political and cultural future, from poetry and education to transatlantic correspondence. By translating previously untranslated Puerto Rican poetry and archival materials, Cruz reveals how the classics were reimagined as a site of cultural resistance and creative expression.

Natalia Duong

Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies and Science & Technology Studies
Project: Chemical Diasporas: Tracing Toxicity through Ecological Solidarity

Duong’s interdisciplinary book project explores the enduring legacy of Agent Orange through the lens of disability studies, performance, and environmental humanities. Drawing on over fifteen years of community-engaged research in Vietnam, her work traces how toxic exposure shapes both bodies and ecologies—and how queer and disabled diasporic Vietnamese artists reimagine solidarity through the concept of “chemical diaspora.” Her fellowship supports this groundbreaking inquiry into the intersection of war, ecology, and human resilience.

Zinzi Clemmons

Assistant Professor, Department of English
Project: Heaven: A Novel of Black Utopia

Clemmons’s forthcoming novel revisits the historically Black agrarian community of Summit (Guinda) in Yolo County, wea

ving a story that uncovers a vision of Black utopia grounded in self-determination and community. Blending fiction, archival research, and oral history, her work interrogates the meanings of race, segregation, and nationalism while celebrating the enduring legacy of Black rural life. Building on the success of her acclaimed debut What We Lose, Clemmons continues to push the boundaries of narrative form and social imagination.

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