NAIS Fellows are graduate students who conduct, create, or disseminate research and creative works in collaboration with NAI communities and individuals. The NAIS Center provides its Fellows with opportunities to share their work and provides resources that allow them to shape their fields. The program is open to all disciplines and graduate programs at the university.
Ridwan Balogun
Ridwan Balogun is religious scholar of anthropology of Islam, Indigenous and Minority Muslim Studies in Africa
Joanne Connauton
Joanne Connauton's research is with the Witsuwit'en Nation in Northwestern British Columbia, Canada. She is working on a project related to a totem pole, removed from the Witsuwit'en community of Hagwilget in 1938 and currently housed in Paris, France at the Quai Branly Museum.
Tyler Daniels
Tyler Daniels is a historian of Early American religion with a focus on Indigenous power, persistence, and worldview in the seventeenth-century Praying Towns of the southern Dawnland (New England).
Florence Egbeyale
Egbeyale’s research investigates maternal healthcare provision in an African Initiated Church in southwestern Nigeria: the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC).
Haylee Glasel
Haylee Glasel focuses on contemporary Indigenous art and media in Sápmi (Norway/Sweden/Finland/Russia) and the disruption of kinship bonds between human and their more-than-human kin through environmental violence like damming rivers.
Austin Howard
Austin Howard is a linguistic anthropologist focusing on expressive language in Indigenous Ecuadorian and Peruvian languages, particularly Amazonian Quechuan languages.
Vito Mammone
Vito Mammone focuses on Mesoamerican archaeometallurgy and its evolution in the culture region. His work allows Purépecha communities to shape of the interpretation of their ancestral technologies
Tess McCoy
Dr. Tess McCoy is an art historian who focuses on contemporary Circumpolar Indigenous art, materiality, and relationality
Dean Michel
Dean Michel will be a Mellon Fellow at Dunbarton Oaks for the 2025-2026 academic year. He is completing a dissertation entitled: A Watery Grave in the Desert: Termination, Survivance, and the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe.
Zack Qualls
This fall, Zack Qualls will be a doctoral student. He is finishing his MA this spring where he focused on the history of Seminole art and the marketplace. He plans on continuing this work as a doctoral student.
Sara Rodriguez Rivera
Sara I. Rodríguez Rivera's research focuses on the visual and spatial cultures of the Caribbean, with particular attention to the entangled histories of land, labor, gender, and memory within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Puerto Rico.
Sheila Scoville
Sheila Scoville is a 2024–2025 Peter Buck Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian. She is completing a dissertation titled "Visualizing Human-Agave Symbiosis in Colonial Nahua Manuscripts."
