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
JC Bright
JC Bright is an art historian who uses the framework of cultural technologies to examine the neo-Indigenous masquerades in Igboland, Nigeria.
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).
Jada Holdiness
Jada Holdiness (Seminole) is a sociologist whose research focuses on Indigenous gerontology.
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
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
Zack Qualls is a doctoral student in the department of history working on a project connecting consumerism and the Native South.
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."
