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.