ASU’s Humanities Institute announces spring 2025 seed grant recipients
ASU’s Humanities Institute has announced six seed grant award recipients whose humanities-based projects engage with challenges in the past, present or future. Every year, the program supports up to 12 months of work for an individual and ASU-based team projects, helping researchers develop projects they will use as a proof of concept when applying for external grants.
“Seed grants awardees experiment, build, make, and put humanities in action,” Humanities Institute Director Ron Broglio says. “They show us what is possible in humanities research.”
The spring 2025 recipients are:
Aaron Hess | Associate Professor, College of Integrative Sciences and Arts
“The Rhetoric of Online Scams” applies rhetorical theory to the issue of online scams, focusing on ethos, trust, and persuasive argumentation. Unlike traditional social science and cybersecurity approaches, this research explores how fraudsters construct credibility and manipulate victims through discourse and technology. Led by Aaron Hess and Jens Kjeldsen, the study involves international collaboration with researchers, financial agencies, and law enforcement. It aims to analyze scam tactics, enhance anti-fraud campaigns, and develop a rhetorical framework for intervention. Funding will support grant applications, collaborative research, and public engagement. The project seeks to bridge humanities and practical fraud prevention efforts on a global scale.
Alan Shane Dillingham | Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Mónica Espaillat Lizardo | Assistant Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
The dispossession of Indigenous land and the transatlantic slave trade were the foundational processes for the nation states that emerged throughout the western hemisphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From Tierra del Fuego to Nova Scotia, these twin processes shaped the continent and the newly independent
republics. Despite their intertwined importance, they have, up until recently, rarely been studied together. “Hemispheric Afro/Indigeneities” seeks to put historians of the Indigenous Americas and the African diaspora in dialogue with each other to better understand the intersection of Black and Native histories and challenge the boundaries that separate their study.
Ana Hedberg Olenina | Associate Professor, School of International Letters and Cultures
“Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and the American Southwest: Indigeneity, Ritual, Immersive Environments” involves organizing a conference, entitled “Sergei Eisenstein in Mexico and the American Southwest: Indigeneity, Ritual, Immersive Environments,” to be held at ASU in November 2025, with a subsequent plan for an edited volume. The conference aims to foreground Chicano, Native American, and Mexican responses to the legacy of the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and in doing so, question the politics of anthropological and archeological discourses that nourished international Modernism. The project will bring together film scholars, art historians, anthropologists, and specialists in Chicano and Latin American Art from ASU and research institutions in the USA and overseas.
Ilana Luna | Full Professor, School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
In their project “Health Humanities and María Luisa Puga’s Diary of Pain” Ilana Luna (ASU) and Carolyn Fornoff (Cornell) will co-translate and critically introduce the work Diary of Pain by Mexican author, María Luisa Puga. The work is an eloquent chronicle of the author’s descent into the debilitating pain of rheumatoid arthritis and was first published the same year as her death, 2004. Though the chronicle is of critical importance and was recently republished at Mexico’s National Autonomous University
(UNAM) in their Vindictas series, it has clear correspondences with the anglophone fields of health humanities/ pain studies, and our translation and scholarly edition will frame the book in dialogue with those fields.
Johanna Taylor | Associate Professor, The Design School, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts
Artists have long worked outside of formal arts spaces, making the process of collaboration within health, transportation, government, and other sectors central to artmaking. While opportunities for cross-sector collaboration that embeds artists in non-arts spaces are increasing and practitioners identify the value of collaboration in their work, there is a gap in understanding its impact on civic systems and communities. In
response, “Creative Civics: Artists, Artmaking, and Cross-sector Collaboration” collects the experiences in developing civic art projects from artists and core collaborators with the goal of defining the objectives of the artists and their civic counterparts and identifying the impact factors that their projects generate.