2025-26 Faculty Research Fellows
Glasscock Faculty Research Fellows
The Faculty Research Fellowship is designed to address a need for funding for research that could not be accomplished otherwise in order to complete a book project, major article or series of articles, or other research project that makes an impact in the field. Fellows participate in the Colloquium Series, which will function as a working group for these works-in-progress. Projects are chosen on the basis or their intellectual rigor, scholarly creativity, and potential to make a significant impact in the candidate’s career and field.
Dr. Heidi Campbell | Professor, Communication & Journalism
Heidi A. Campbell is Professor of Communication, an affiliate faculty in Religious Studies, and a Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University. She is also director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies, and a founder of the study of Digital Religion. Her award-winning research focuses on the intersection of technology, religion digital culture, and Jewish, Muslim & Christian media negotiations. She is author of over 100 articles and a dozen books including When Religion Meets New Media (2010) and Digital Creatives and the Rethinking Religious Authority (2021). She has been quoted in news outlets such as the Houston Chronicle, USA Today, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and on the BBC.
Dr. Michael Collins | Associate Professor, English
Dr. Michael Collin's published scholarship explores the relationship between risk, altruism, sibling rivalry and sovereignty as that relationship emerges in works by a range of writers (including Etheridge Knight, Yusef Komunyakaa, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Jacques Derrida, and Dante) and in institutions such as the Group of 77 developing nations. He is currently working on several scholarly and creative projects that extend his exploration of the nexus between risk, altruism, sibling rivalry and sovereignty.
Dr. Marcelo López-Dinardi | Associate Professor, Architecture
Marcelo López-Dinardi is an Associate Professor of architecture at Texas A&M University. His work explores architecture’s entanglements with culture. He is the editor of Architecture from Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023) and Degrowth (ARQ, 2022), and co-editor of Promiscuous Encounters (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2013). López-Dinardi’s words and creative works have been included in the JUMEX Museum, Venice Architecture Biennale, MoCAD, Istanbul Design Biennial, Citygroup, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Old Armory of the Spanish Navy of Puerto Rico’s National Gallery, MAC-PR, CAAPPR, The Avery Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, JSAH, Domus, Art Forum, URBAN_NEXT, PLAT, ARQ, and Materia, among others. He was a 2023-2024 Bridging the Divides: Post-Disaster Futures Fellow for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies for Hunter College-CUNY and Princeton University. His architectural design work has been awarded by the AIA and the Puerto Rico Architect’s Association. In 2022, he was nationally elected At-Large Director for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) Board of Directors for 2022-2025. He holds a B.Arch. from the PUPR (cum laude) and an MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices for architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.
At TAMU, his teaching incorporates architecture’s relationships with political economy, the environment, and its underpinnings as a cultural practice beyond a profession. During his time as a Glasscock Fellow, he will continue doing archival research on the industrial development of the construction material, cement—the second most consumed good besides water globally, and the built environment produced by its use in the context of Puerto Rico. The project asks questions about colonial legacies of material practices and how we shape our architectural and built environment imaginary in a futuring practice.
Dr. Ilayda B. Onder | Assistant Professor, Political Science
Ilayda B. Onder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from The Pennsylvania State University in 2024. Her research investigates political violence and civil conflict processes, with a focus on the intersection of violent political behavior and the socio-organizational dimensions of rebellion. Specifically, she examines how rebel organizations' violent and nonviolent interactions with allies, rivals, civilians, and the broader public shape conflict outcomes such as mobilization into rebellion and civilian victimization. Her scholarship encompasses two (strongly aligned) lines of inquiry: (1) rebel-civilian interactions and (2) rebel communication strategies, with emerging projects also exploring multi-party civil conflicts and rebel intra-group politics. She uses a variety of quantitative methods, including network analysis, text-as-data approaches, quasi-experiments, and survey experiments. Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Interactions, among others. She co-organizes the Junior Scholars in Quantitative Conflict Workshop and is affiliated with the Peace & Conflict team of the Lab for Economic Development Research (LEDR). During her time as a Glasscock Fellow, she will conduct research on the impact of rebel internal governance—the institutions, structures, and practices designed to codify, standardize, and enforce behavior among rebel cadre members—on civil conflict processes, especially rebel recruitment and abusive rebel-civilian interactions.
Dr. Portia Owusu | Assistant Professor, English
Portia Owusu is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching focus on African American, African, and diaspora literatures, with particular interests in history and historiography, memory studies, cultural philosophy, and contemporary Black narratives. She holds a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Kansas during the 2015–2016 academic year.
Dr. Owusu is the author of Spectres from the Past: Slavery and the Politics of "History" in West African and African-American Literature (Routledge, 2019). Her work has appeared in various scholarly publications, and she is currently working on her second book project, Other Lives: Death, Mourning, and Black Literature, which is under contract with Louisiana State University Press
Dr. Nancy Plankey-Videla | Associate Professor, Sociology
Nancy Plankey-Videla is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Latina/o and Mexican American Studies program at Texas A&M University, with a courtesy appointment at the School of Law. She earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her multiple award-winning work, We Are in This Dance Together: Gender, Power, and Globalization at a Mexican Garment Firm (Rutgers University Press, 2012), examines how shifts in the global economy shape firm strategy, which in turn affect shopfloor dynamics at a cutting-edge firm, leading to women’s empowerment and collective consciousness. In the last decade, she conducts community-engaged research with Latine immigrants in the Bryan/College Station area highlighting how immigration policy affects their everyday lives. Her research on labor, gender, immigration, deportation, and community-engaged research has been published in prestigious journals like Social Problems, Social Forces, American Behavioralist Scientist, Qualitative Sociology, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and Feminist Studies. She teaches courses on Latine immigration and intersectionality. During her time as a Glasscock Fellow, she will be conducting visual and ethnographic research with deported and compelled returned individuals from the U.S. to Mexico, examining what ‘home’ means to them, and how this meaning encourages them to set roots in Mexico or routes back to the U.S.
Dr. Zachary Stewart | Associate Professor, Architecture
Zachary Stewart is Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory in the Department of Architecture and James M. Singleton IV ’66, FAIA, Endowed Professor in the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on the buildings, cities, and landscapes of medieval Europe—with an emphasis on later medieval Britain. He is author of Building the Parish Church in Late Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and co-editor of The Baptismal Font Canopy of St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich: Studies of a Medieval Monument over Four Centuries (Brill, 2023). His research has been published in The Journal of Architectural Education, Speculum, Different Visions, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and The Antiquaries Journal, as well as in numerous edited collections. His scholarship has been supported by the US-UK Fulbright Commission, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, the American Philosophical Society, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (among others). His Glasscock-supported project investigates the cultural politics of architectural style around the Atlantic Archipelago (the islands of Britain and Ireland) between ca. 1400 and ca. 1600.