Berkeley Geography is proud to announce that both Tamara Z. Jamil & Alexis E. Wood have been awarded a 2025 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.
The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship supports 45 doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences as they pursue innovative approaches to dissertation research, including new methodologies, formats, and collaborations with community partners beyond the academy. ACLS launched the program in 2023 to advance change in humanistic scholarship by recognizing emerging scholars who take risks in the modes, methods, and subjects of their research.
Tamara’s research investigates the rise in jail construction in rural California amidst shifting dynamics of mass incarceration. While US prison populations have decreased by 25% in the last decade, rural jail populations have increased by 27% nationwide. The role of policies in this shift, such as Proposition 36, are fairly straightforward. Less clear, however, is where new facilities to accommodate these population shifts will be sited and why. “Jail Expansion, Aesthetics of ‘Blight,’ and Rural Landscapes” applies innovative methodologies like “Situated Testimony” along archival research across three rural California counties. The study sheds light on the social and material consequences of the ongoing silent shift in US carceral geographies, rendering visible the conditions that make certain places eligible for, or vulnerable to, this wave of carceral expansion.
Alexis's research investigates The State of Jefferson is a state secessionist movement amidst economic, environmental, and social crises in Northern California. Centering the concept of “felt distance,” this project examines how digital landscapes shape rural identities and political mobilizations, manifesting anxieties in digital spaces and reshaping the physical landscape. Drawing on an experimental cartographic approach read through a Benjaminian lens, this research combines ethnographic field work, computational analysis, and archival methods to propose a retheorizing of space which articulates the role of digital technologies in both identity construction and rural socio-political movements. In doing so, “State of Mine(Mind)” proposes that the constellations of historical narrative, accounts of lived experience in Northern California, and a new method of mapping these fragments together are central to explaining deepening political polarization and the growing popularity of right-wing movements.
“ACLS is proud to support these fellows, who are poised to conduct groundbreaking dissertation research and broaden the audience for humanistic scholarship,” said Alison Chang, ACLS Program Officer in US Programs. “Their innovative projects not only produce new avenues of knowledge, but also inspire the evolution of doctoral education across the humanities and social sciences.”
Jamil and Wood have been recognized as two of 45 awardees, selected from a pool of nearly 900 applicants through a rigorous, multi-stage peer review process that drew on the expertise of more than 150 scholars across the country. Each fellow receives an award of up to $52,000, consisting of a $42,000 stipend; up to $8,000 for project-related research, training, professional development, and travel; and a $2,000 stipend to support external mentorship that offers new perspectives on the fellow’s project and expands their advising network.