The International Institute of Research in Paris' Resident Faculty Fellowship supports month-long residencies at the University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris, providing an opportunity to collaborate intensively with colleagues from institutions across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Find more information on the 2026 fellows and their projects below.
Abstract
Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) have significant discretion in implementing public policies, are crucial in determining migrant and refugees' access to healthcare, and can influence broader social inclusion as well. The faculty residency proposed here will reconvene four scholars, two from the University of Chicago and two from Bilkent University in Türkiye, to conduct collaborative research at the John W. Boyer Center in Paris. This multi-year project addresses the drivers of attitudes and discretionary behaviors by frontline health workers in Türkiye when providing healthcare to the public, including migrants, refugees, and other vulnerable groups. Specifically, funding will support dedicated, in-person collaboration by the research team to complete analysis and writing for a paper based 60 in-depth interviews with public health staff from 20 health facilities across Türkiye, conduct initial analysis of a survey experiment that will be implemented with health workers in the current year, and plan the project’s next phase, specifically a follow-up wave of interviews with health workers and patients, including Turkish citizens and Syrian refugees. The proposed research contributes to academic and policy debates at the intersection of migration and state capacity, namely how to support health workers in providing high-quality, dignified, and equitable healthcare for diverse populations.
Award Type
1-year (2026-27)
Division
Crown
Collaborators
Emel Özdora Akşak (Burcu Pinar Alakoc, University of Chicago)
Melike Metintaş (Bilkent University Department of Communication and Design; Associate Professor, Research Collaborator
Abstract
This proposal represents the next stage of a collaboration between Jennifer Pitts and Michele Bee on Adam Smith’s political economy. Our previous project examined key themes surrounding the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations, including exchange, inequality, and empire. We now focus on an intensive one-month research residency at the IIRP devoted to completing a co-authored article that consolidates our central theoretical claims in light of Smith’s moral philosophy and his account of intersubjective recognition. Rather than reading Smith as a theorist of self-interest alone, we argue that his political economy is rooted in a broader account of the conditions under which human beings flourish. For Smith, flourishing requires social and economic relations structured by rough equality, mutual recognition, and non-dominating exchange. We explore how inequality, empire, and systems of domination distort these processes and undermine both moral and economic flourishing. The residency will provide dedicated time for writing and structured discussion with graduate students from both institutions. The resulting article will be submitted to a leading journal and will serve as the conceptual foundation for a future ERC Synergy Grant proposal on equality and global political economy, with IIRP and the University of Salento among the host institutions.
Award Type
1-year (2026-27)
Division
SSD
Political Science
Collaborators
Michele Bee (University of Lecce; Bocconi University Milan)
Abstract
“Translation and Dissent” is an interdisciplinary experiment in collaborative scholarship that explores divergence, dissensus, and failed conversations as productive frameworks for understanding political crisis and conflict—particularly within the context of Arabic and Hebrew literary translation. The project aims to address the silencing, exhaustion, and mistrust that have shaped academic discourse around Palestine and Israel by conceptualizing new methodologies that regard asymmetry, refusal, and nonrelation not as obstacles, but as generative starting points. Building on previous and ongoing work supported the Neubauer Collegium, we hope to engage scholars Nicole Khayat and Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani in a conversation that will ground our work in their local insights. Employing the Online Cultural and Historic Research Platform developed at the University of Chicago (OCHRE), the project documents translation networks—innovatively including refusals, conditional permissions, and institutional silences—to reveal the “grammar of refusal” structuring Arabic-Hebrew relations. Through seminars and collaborative workshops, “Translation and Dissent” aims to launch a replicable and ethically grounded methodology for literary research, foregrounding digital tools and theory as co-produced, situated knowledge, and responding to current moral and intellectual urgencies with a commitment to holding tension, making disconnections legible, and enabling nuanced critical engagement.
Award Type
1-year (2026-27)
Division
ADH
Middle Eastern Studies
Collaborators
Dima Ayoub (Middlebury College, convener and OCHRE platform development)
Nicole Khayat (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Abstract
This research and writing project and plan for a mobilizing performance marrying the public and environmental humanities challenges prevailing territorial and anthropocentric conceptions of urbanism by reckoning with the res communis of urban water as a medium for life and a plasmatic force, counting as compatriots and kin the “minor” fauna that ply the Parisian waters. Staging conversations across literature, philosophy, theater, and the natural sciences to ponder questions surrounding the liquid ecologies of Paris that will directly impact the future of a metropolis besieged with floods, drought, pollution, algal blooms, extinction, extreme temperatures, and other forms of ecological crisis, the collaborators will compose textual and transmedia accounts of the city that take on perspectives of its submerged denizens, native, non-native, and migratory, and reckon with the changes to urbanism, theorized and actual, that heeding the threats to these subcitizens (and consequently to all Parisian citizens) may entail. The residency period will encompass dialogue between collaborators; field and seminar discussions with colleagues in adjoining fields; and a culminating public event at the IIRP, all aimed at an eventual performance/demonstration of the geopoetics of plasmatic Paris for theatrical and “floating” contexts that will bring apprehension of Paris’s subcitizens to public awareness.
Award Type
1-year (2026-27)
Division
AHD
English, Creative Writing, RLL
Collaborators
Emanuele Coccia (École des hautes études en sciences sociales: interlocutor/writer)
Frédérique Aït-Touati (CNRS/École des hautes études en sciences sociales/Theatre de la cité internationale: interlocutor/curator/performance director)
Abstract
The DAMIC-M (Dark Matter In CCDs at Modane) experiment, currently under construction at the Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane in France, aims to detect low-mass dark matter particles using ultra-sensitive charge-coupled devices (CCDs). With unprecedented sensitivity, DAMIC-M has the potential to achieve breakthroughs in understanding the particle nature of dark matter, a central open question in physics and cosmology. Achieving these goals requires precise characterization of natural and instrumental background sources that could mimic dark matter signals.
The Resident Fellows Team, from the University of Chicago and the Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria, will conduct a month-long residency at the IIRP, University of Chicago, to finalize and validate simulation codes, integrate background data, develop a modular analysis pipeline, and produce comprehensive documentation. Close collaboration with CNRS groups in Paris will further strengthen the effort. The residency will deliver a validated background model, enabling reliable interpretation of DAMIC-M's first scientific data and supporting future analyses. This effort will culminate in the publication of the background model alongside the first DAMIC-M scientific results. The collaboration will continue beyond the residency period.
Award Type
1-year (2026-27)
Division
PSD
Enrico Fermi Institute
Collaborators
Nuria Castello-Mor (Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria in Spain; Ramon y Cajal Researcher (tenure-track), DAMIC-M Simulation and Analysis Task Coordinator)
Abstract
Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) have significant discretion in implementing public policies, are crucial in determining migrant and refugees' access to healthcare, and can influence broader social inclusion as well. The faculty residency proposed here will reconvene four scholars, two from the University of Chicago and two from Bilkent University in Türkiye, to conduct collaborative research at the John W. Boyer Center in Paris. This multi-year project addresses the drivers of attitudes and discretionary behaviors by frontline health workers in Türkiye when providing healthcare to the public, including migrants, refugees, and other vulnerable groups. Specifically, funding will support dedicated, in-person collaboration by the research team to complete analysis and writing for a paper based 60 in-depth interviews with public health staff from 20 health facilities across Türkiye, conduct initial analysis of a survey experiment that will be implemented with health workers in the current year, and plan the project’s next phase, specifically a follow-up wave of interviews with health workers and patients, including Turkish citizens and Syrian refugees. The proposed research contributes to academic and policy debates at the intersection of migration and state capacity, namely how to support health workers in providing high-quality, dignified, and equitable healthcare for diverse populations.
Award Type
1-year (2026-27)
Division
Crown
Collaborators
Emel Özdora Akşak (Burcu Pinar Alakoc, University of Chicago)
Bilkent University Department of Communication and Design; Associate Professor, Research Collaborator
Melike Metintaş