Harris Faculty Fellowships 2026-27

Dear Colleagues, 

Each year, Grinnell College awards up to three Harris Faculty Fellowships, which provide recipients with a full year to focus on research. Harris Faculty Fellowships also provide funding for recipients’ departments to hire term visiting faculty for the Fellowship year. 

With thanks to the good work of the members of the Committee for the Support of Faculty Scholarship, who reviewed and thoughtfully considered a stellar roster of proposals, I am pleased to announce Christy Hazel (Mathematics), Andreas Jozwiak (Policy Studies/Political Science), and Julian Rios Acuña (Philosophy) as the Harris Faculty Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year. 

Below, you will find descriptions of the projects that they will pursue during their pre-tenure research leaves. Their research explores major issues in their fields, developing powerful new tools to study geometrical objects in mathematics, exploring how welfare states support the needs and integration of migrants, and revisiting the classical philosophical distinction between description and prescription through a decolonial lens. 

Please join me in congratulating Christy, Andreas, and Julian on their outstanding accomplishments. 

Sincerely,

Ruth P. Feingold 
Dean of the College 

Harris Faculty Research Projects

Christy Hazel: Hazel’s Harris project, “Shapes and Symmetries: Computing with Equivalent Cohomology Theories,” deals with a mathematical phenomenon known as Bredon cohomologies. Broadly speaking, Hazel’s research addresses complex geometric problems by encoding them in algebraic data. Bredon cohomology is a specific approach to this work that accounts for the symmetries of geometric objects, providing more refined information about them. Already a leader in this area, Hazel will use the Fellowship period to, among other things, develop tools to compute Bredon cohomology more efficiently, including providing a more robust theoretical framework. As part of her project, Hazel will serve as one of three co-leaders of a research network through the Women in Topology program, which supports collaborative research in algebraic topology, especially among women and gender minorities. 

Andreas Jozwiak: Jozwiak’s project, “Childcare in Context: How Place, Childcare, and Migration Intersect,” examines migrant families’ participation in state-sponsored childcare programs, which are a key feature of efforts in modern welfare states to meet modern social and demographic challenges arising from migration. In post-industrial countries with low-cost public childcare, children with family histories of migration are less likely to be enrolled in childcare than native peers. Jozwiak will build upon his earlier quantitative work exploring the childcare choices of migrants to different areas of Germany, adding interviews with local politicians, childcare administrators, and childcare providers. Together, these studies will form the basis for a mixed-methods book project exploring factors that affect migrant families’ participation in state-sponsored childcare programs, including where families settle, how program implementation varies in different settings, the factors that influence family decision making, and how welfare states respond to the needs of changing populations.

Julian Rios Acuña: Rios Acuña’s project, “Between Inheritance and Foundation: A Critical Dialogue with Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Decolonial Philosophy,” explores the work of Castro-Gómez, a contemporary Colombian philosopher, as a window into an enduring philosophical question: What is the relationship between describing social and political reality and prescribing what it could, should, or must be. By focusing on the writing of Castro-Gómez and placing his work in dialogue with African and Afrodiasporic thinkers, Rios Acuña brings a fresh decolonial perspective to his analysis, grappling with colonial inheritances of violence, exclusion and inequality, and how they inform visions of a social reality that confronts them. The Harris Fellowship will allow Rios Acuña to make progress on a book manuscript and book proposal that he plans to submit in August 2028.