Full-Year Fellows (2024-2025)

Darius Bost
Clark-Oakley Fellow and Associate Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Sensual Histories of the Black Atlantic”
Darius Bost is associate professor of Black Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His research centers on literary and visual cultures of the black diaspora, black queer history, and HIV/AIDS. While in residence at the Clark Art Institute and Oakley Humanities Center, Bost plans to work on his current book manuscript, which focuses on contemporary queer visual cultures of the black Atlantic.

Kim Gutschow
Senior Lecturer, Anthropology & Religion
“Maya Mattered: Birth, Death and the Buddha”

Francis Oakley (Senior Fellow)
President Emeritus and Edward Dorr Griffin Emeritus Professor of the History of Ideas
Professor Oakley recently completed a reinterpretation of the history of political thought from late antiquity to the mid-seventeenth century; the three volume series is titled: "The Emergence of Western Political Thought in the Latin Middle Ages". Yale University Press published volume one in 2010 with the title: "Empty Bottles of Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050)." The second volume was releases in 2012: "The Mortgage of the Past: Reshaping the Ancient Political Inheritance (1050-1300)." The third volume, "The Watershed of Modern Politics: Law, Virtue, Kingship, and Consent (1300-1650)" was published in 2015. Professor Oakley's memoir, "Far from the Cast Iron Shore," was published in 2018.

Professor of Classics
“The Master's House: Paternal Authority and Exemplary Virtue in Roman Literature”
Fall 2024 Fellows

Olga Kim
Assistant Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature
“Cinema on the Edge: Late Soviet Tableau Aesthetics”
Katie McKenna ‘25
Sociology major
“The Mobility Paradox: Williams College, Labor of Mobility, and the Reproduction of Inequality at Elite Colleges”

Bojana Mladenovic
Class of 1955 Memorial Professor of Philosophy
“Other Minds”

Steven E. Nafziger
Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr. '41 Professor of Economics
“The Black Repartition: Serfdom, Reform, and Economic Development in the Russian Empire, 1850-1914”

Sidney A. Rothstein
Assistant Professor of Political Science
“Imagined Agency: Tracing Tech’s Political Power in Digital Transformation"

Matthew Tokeshi
Associate Professor of Political Science
“A New Measure of Anti-Asian Prejudice and its Political Consequences”
Spring 2025 Fellows

Associate Professor of Music
“Multi-Media Research on Suriname Maroon Performance Culture, with a focus on popular music and storytelling”
Karim Elasmi ‘25
English major
“In a Mutual and Unknown Way: Re-figuring Aesthetic Autonomy through Kant and al-Fārābi”


Li Yu
Herbert H. Lehman Professor of Chinese
“Teaching Language as Speech Acts: Multimodality and Contextualized Performance”
Previous Clark-Oakley Humanities Fellows
- Erica Moiah James (2023-2024)
- Jonathan Flatley (2022-2023)
- Irene V. Small (2021-2022)
- Timothy Hyde (2020-2021)
- Kirsten Scheid (2019-2020)
- Jill Casid (2018-2019)
- Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (2017-2018)
- Marden Nichols (2016-2017)
- Kavita Singh (2015-2016)
- Carrie Noland (2014-2015)
- Roberto Tejada (2013-2014)
- Lisa Saltzman (2012-2013)
- Bruce Redford (2011-2012)
- Michèle Hannoosh (2010-2011)
- Mary L. Roberts (2009-2010)
- Aamir Mufti (2008-2009)
- Jonathan D. Katz (2007-2008)
- Ernst van Alphen (2006-2007)