What does it mean to study democracy?
At Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, it may mean researching protest culture in Black music traditions. Or the politics behind ideological shifts in the Czech and Slovak punk scene. Or the intersection of personal space and the public sphere in women’s writing across cultures.
Regardless of topic, studying democracy means engaging in dialogue with other scholars working across diverse humanistic disciplines — and emerging with new insights.
This has been the work of the 2024-25 cohort of undergraduate fellows at the Fox Center, the university’s hub for the humanities.
This is the first year that the center has selected its scholars and organized events around a theme: “Democracy: Past, Present, Future.” It’s also the first time the undergraduate fellows program has spanned a full academic year.
The Fox Center is engaged in a period of redefinition under the leadership of Carla Freeman, Goodrich C. White Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The redesign broadens the center’s public engagement across all its fellowship programs at the graduate, postdoctoral research, faculty and undergraduate levels.
The expansion of the undergraduate program, especially, is key to what Freeman calls her “big-tent vision” for the center, which focuses on “amplifying the crucial importance of humanistic inquiry and scholarship beginning with undergraduate students.
“I really believe that investing in the undergraduate experience is essential, not just on Emory’s campus, but for the future of this country and the rest of the world,” she says, especially in this time of political division and uncertainty.
Undergraduate Fox fellows are fourth-year students working on their honors theses in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. They receive support from senior fellows — graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty — who serve as dedicated mentors.
But for the undergraduates taking part in the program, the impact of their time at the center goes far beyond the projects they’ll turn in come April.
The humanities hold bright futures
Alex Minovici has always been passionate about research and academics. A double-major in history and philosophy, politics and law, she also minored briefly in physics, figuring, “I loved learning about the whole world, including the history of it, so why not the physicality of it, too?”
When she learned about the program at the Fox Center, she felt almost as if she had stumbled across something intended expressly for her.
“I was excited,” she says, “to learn there was an institution on campus that supports students interested in using the humanities for research that’s relevant to the world today.”
Minovici, whose family is from Romania, is writing an honors thesis about how national memory of that nation’s violent 1989 revolution influences political engagement there now.
In the fall, financial support from the fellowship enabled her to travel with two other fellows to a major academic conference on Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies. There, the students met potential PhD program contacts and saw how scholarly conversations about their areas of study are playing out on a broader academic stage.
“A lot of people like to harp on, ‘Oh, you’re getting a humanities degree. What are you going to do with that?’” says Minovici. “It turns out there are a lot of things to do with it.”
She’s now considering pursing a PhD in anthropology, inspired in part by conversations with a graduate fellow.
She says experiences like these conversations, the academic conference and a Fox Center tour of the Michael C. Carlos Museum led by a former fellow have demonstrated a wide range of academic and professional possibilities offered by a life in the humanities.
And that’s exactly the idea.
Shiv Datt Sharma, the undergraduate fellows program’s graduate teaching assistant, says that giving young scholars “a taste of what it means to be a professional in the humanities” is a cornerstone of the program.
“We try to find ways for students to see beyond the scholarly project of their theses,” he says, “to the larger experience of intellectual and cultural life in the humanities.”
Learning from those who’ve been there
Back in August, when Klaire Mason came to the Fox Center as a new undergraduate fellow, she had a tough time describing her thesis-in-progress to people.
Meetings with her Fox Center advisor changed that for the history and creative writing major.
Visiting faculty fellow Hubert Tworzecki helped Mason pare down her many ideas to a succinct focus: how President Vladimir Putin’s election to a third term put Russia on an authoritarian trajectory.
After further research, Mason noticed what she calls “a huge gap in the academic literature.”
She now plans to continue her scholarship at the graduate level, informed by conversations with Fox fellows at more senior levels about what to expect from the PhD program experience.
These sorts of breakthroughs are exciting to watch, says Sharma. “I’m seeing just how much professional confidence students are able to build. It’s really magical for me to watch them realize how meaningful their work is to the larger world.”
One theme, many intersections
The democracy theme attracted a diverse array of topics — and fellows have also found inspiration in the spaces of overlap.
Take Paige Scanlon and Yijin Li.
Scanlon is an interdisciplinary studies major engaging in ethnographic work with Tibetan nuns. During a recent peer review session, she suggested the religious concept of “darshan” to art history major Yijin Li as a possible avenue of study. Li’s thesis looks at a rare type of Tibetan Buddhist scroll.
Or Adelaide Rosene and Alex Minovici.
Rosene is a history major and English minor whose work studying the racial violence of “sundown towns” in the Midwest inspired Minovici to apply the concept of “slow violence” to her work about Romania. (“Slow violence” occurs over time and often is not immediately identified as violence.)
The interdisciplinary approach at the Fox Center reflects the way scholarship happens in the larger world, says Freeman. “You’ll find anthropologists doing literary analysis and sociologists working quantitatively as well as qualitatively. And I think for the students to witness that and experience it, it's just beautiful to watch.”
It takes a village to write a thesis
Whether sharing research methods, getting inspiration from new ideas or discovering that everyone else’s writing process is just as messy as one’s own, achievement in the program is fueled by a deep sense of camaraderie.
“Because what we do is bring our own individual ideas and excitement and curiosity,” says Scanlon, “and then meld that with the passion and spirit of others. So, on a thesis, you’re the one writing it and signing your name, but really, it takes a village. I’ve really been reminded of that within the Fox fellowship.”
Fellow student Jaytrice Mackey, an African American studies major, recalls the very first day she visited the house where the Fox Center is based to meet the other fellows. “Walking away,” she says, “I was so excited, I called my sister back home, and I was like, ‘You won’t believe this. They’re creating a community. A community of scholars.’”
A preview of the Fox Center’s upcoming theme: “Life/Story” In the following Q&A, Carla Freeman, the center’s director, explains why this theme was chosen and what to expect. Why “Life/Story”?The theme came from convening members of our faculty and brainstorming concepts and frames that would elicit interesting work and put a broad range of scholars in conversation. Across a wide variety of methodological approaches to scholarship in the humanities, there is often the challenge of interpreting the specificity of a single individual or a family and what those lives suggest about a particular time and place. And so, if you look at the approach that, say, a biographer takes, or an oral historian, a novelist, or a philosopher, some are interrogating voluminous piles of written material such as diaries and records in an archive; others are looking at legal documentation or medical records, poems and scholarly works, or hours of interview transcripts, but they’re all interpreting: What patterns and contradictions are unearthed in the records that make up a single life? We will host a couple of exciting keynote speakers in the fall to kick start the year, and our spring 2026 Ellman lecturer will contribute in some truly fascinating ways to this theme. How would you like to see next year’s fellows explore the theme?There are conundrums that all the disciplines approach somewhat differently. Say, how do we interpret the life of an enslaved person for whom we may have limited written records, vis a vis the life of a planter whose diaries and letters have been meticulously preserved; what do the records and the gaps convey about a particular moment in time and a particular region of the country or the world? How do we interpret the individual in relation to the broader society, as an agent in the making of history and in the making of culture? These are among the kinds of discussions and debates that I hope will spark lively engagement. Who should apply for the Fox Center undergraduate fellowship?I want to see students apply who want to be part of a collective pursuit of humanistic inquiry, in addition to being supported and mentored in their individual project. I’ve seen what may, at first glance, look like unlikely intellectual alliances evolve as these scholars learn about one another’s projects. For me, the magic — both scholarly and personal — is in these relationships. So, I encourage truly curious students who are eager to keep learning and want to see other students thrive to apply! Photo by Sarah Woods, Emory Photo/Video |