2026-27 Faculty Research Fellows
Meet our 2026-27 Glasscock 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. Fritz Bartel | Associate Professor, International Affairs
Fritz Bartel is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. His book The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism was published with Harvard University Press in 2022. It won the Center for Presidential History Book Prize, the Ed Hewitt Book Prize in Political Economy from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and as a dissertation, the 2018 Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). The book has also now been translated into Spanish and German. Along with Nuno P. Monteiro, he co-edited Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Enterprise & Society, and Russian History. Bartel is now at work on a global history of political, economic, and legal transitions at the end of the 20th century.
Dr. Carmela Garritano | Associate Professor, International Affairs
Carmela Garritano is Professor of International Affairs and affiliated faculty of Africana Studies and The Energy Institute at Texas A&M. A former Arts and Humanities Fellow and winner of a 2024 Bush School Faculty Research Award, Garritano has also won grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the US Department of Education, the West Africa Research Association, and Humanities Texas. Garritano works at the intersection of politics, energy, African art, and African film and media. Her first book African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History (Ohio University Press, 2013) was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and was awarded The First Book Award by the African Literature Association. Dr. Garritano’s second single-authored book African Energy Worlds in Film and Media (Indiana University Press, 2025) joins the work of energy humanists to analyze the social dimensions of energy forms and systems as represented in African cinema and to map the infrastructural links between electricity and local film production. With Kenneth W. Harrow, she edited A Companion to African Cinema (Wiley Blackwell, 2019) and is currently editing an updated Companion to African Cinema for Cambridge University Press. Garritano’s new book project is tentatively called African Plasticity: A Cultural History of Plastics in Ghana. It investigates plastic production, consumption, recycling, policy, and art in Ghana from the end of the colonial period to the present.
Dr. Ege Selin Islekel | Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Ege Selin Islekel is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty Member in Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century continental philosophy, post-Foucauldian biopolitics, and Feminist Philosophy. She is the author of Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance (Northwestern University Press, 2024), which investigates epistemic and political forms of resistance enacted through collective practices of mourning in Turkey and Latin America. In recognition of her scholarship, she received Texas A&M University's Transformative Research Impact Award in 2025. She is also the co-editor of Foucault, Derrida, and the Biopolitics of Punishment (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Islekel is currently completing her second book Monstrous Visions: Mechanisms of Defense and Regimes of Visibility, which develops a decolonial genealogy of monstrosity and examines the intersections of criminality and modern regimes of visibility. Her work has appeared in journals including Foucault Studies, Philosophy Compass, Theory & Event, Hypatia, The CLR James Journal, philoSOPHIA, and Philosophy Today, as well as in edited collections such as Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory and Cinsiyeti Yazmak (Writing Sex).
Dr. Chaitanya Lakkimsetti | Associate Professor, Sociology
Professor Chaitanya Lakkimsetti’s work centers on gender, sexuality, law, and citizenship. In her empirical and theoretical work, she employs transnational and intersectional approaches to study sexual and gender inequalities in a global context. Dr. Lakkimsetti's current book project Demanding Death: Rape, Death Penalty, and Vigilante Violence in Contemporary India, is an interdisciplinary study of the growing demands for the death penalty and/or instant death—through lynching or extrajudicial killings--for rape in contemporary India. An article from this project, “‘Hang the Rapists Immediately’: Rape Vigilantism, State Violence, and Impunity in Contemporary India,” was recently published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Dr. Defne Över | Assistant Professor, Sociology
Defne Över is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. As a political and cultural sociologist, she examines how political power is constructed, legitimized, and contested. With a primary empirical focus on Turkey and broader theoretical relevance to global transformations in populism and democratic backsliding, her work develops an interdisciplinary research agenda on media transformation, legitimacy, mass mobilization, and autocratic legalism, bringing sociological perspectives into conversation with debates in communication, political science, and law and society. Her book Boundaries That Divide: How Journalists in Turkey Surrendered Their Power Over Politics investigates how Turkey’s news media became an accomplice in the country’s democratic backsliding process instead of acting as a break against it. Her more recent work extends this research agenda to the study of individual and collective responses to disaster risk, including vaccine behavior in the United States and earthquake preparedness in Mexico and Turkey. Över’s other work has appeared in Law and Social Inquiry; PLOSOne; Social and Legal Studies; Media, Culture & Society; Current Sociology; Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change; Qualitative Sociology, and several edited collections.
Dr. Meg Perret | Assistant Professor, Global Languages & Cultures
Dr. Meg Perret is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Texas A&M University in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures. She completed her Ph.D. in History of Science with a secondary field in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Harvard University. She works in the areas of feminist science studies, environmental humanities, and queer theory.
Dr. Brian Rouleau | Professor, History
Brian Rouleau is a Professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M University, with research interests in the nineteenth-century United States and American foreign relations. His most recent monograph, Empire’s Nursery: Children’s Literature and the Origins of the American Century, traced the importance of dime novels, pulp fiction, and comic books in educating young Americans about their nation’s growing imperial footprint. Rouleau’s current book, generously supported by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, examines the 1894 murder of an American citizen in Honduras. Part true crime story and part diplomatic history, the project will explore how that killing helped transform the United States into a hemispheric hegemon. During his time as a Glasscock Fellow, he will be conducting archival research in London and New York in order to trace the dramatic fallout that occurred in the aftermath of this consequential homicide.