2025 HumanitiesX Fellows
HumanitiesX, funded by the Mellon Foundation, is DePaul’s Experiential Humanities Collaborative. Professor Lisa Dush, Faculty Director of DePaul’s HumanitiesX program announced the 2025 HumanitiesX fellows. Matters at Play’s Professor Tran will expand her transformational game design and immigration games work by collaborating with Dr. Ramya Ramanath and their community partner, Sanctuary Working Group, to teach “Finding Home: Exploring Migrant Housing Challenges and Solutions via Interactive Storytelling” in Fall 2025.
The year-long HumanitiesX fellowship supports interdisciplinary teams of faculty and community partners as they collaboratively design and teach new, community-engaged experiential humanities courses. The teams of fellows and the courses they will develop are as follows:
- Yoalli Rodriguez Aguilera (Latin American and Latino Studies) and Stephanie Manriquez (Director, Lumpen Radio): developing the course From FM Waves to Activism: Storytelling of Latino Voices through Community Radio
- Winifred Curran (Geography and GIS) and Claudia Galeno-Sanchez (Executive Director, Women for Green Spaces): developing the course Environmental Placemaking: Building Community for Environmental Justice
- Sanjukta Mukherjee (Women’s and Gender Studies), Anuradha Rana (School of Cinematic Arts), and Ana Romero (Executive Director, Women for Economic Justice): developing the course Solidarity Economy: Creating Change Through Feminist Filmmaking
- Ramya Ramanath (School of Public Service), Lien Tran (School of Design), and Charlotte Long (Housing Specialist, Sanctuary Working Group): developing the course Finding Home: Exploring Migrant Housing Challenges and Solutions via Interactive Storytelling
The “Finding Home” team will work on developing their course over the next 6 months. The course plan is to introduce students to international migration and U.S. migrant housing policy, and to engage in experiential learning by connecting them with the migrant community and their private hosts in Chicagoland. Dr. Ramanath will share her research findings on migrant housing via oral history with students as source material. Students will then work to complete by the end of the 10-week course a set of interactive stories that highlight the unique circumstances and challenges migrants face when seeking housing and finding a place to call home. Additionally, they will also work on translating the research findings from the perspective of private hosts of migrants into an additional set of interactive stories. The course will culminate with a final presentation of the student work, which will be available online for any interested people to experience for themselves.