{"id":19504,"date":"2026-08-26T08:36:43","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T12:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/?p=19504"},"modified":"2026-08-26T08:36:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T12:36:44","slug":"africana-studies-and-english-professor-awarded-2026-career-enhancement-fellowship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/news\/africana-studies-and-english-professor-awarded-2026-career-enhancement-fellowship\/","title":{"rendered":"Africana Studies and English professor awarded 2026 Career Enhancement Fellowship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 August 26 \u2013 Janet Kong-Chow, assistant professor of<a href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/africana\/\"> Africana Studies <\/a>and <a href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/english\/\">English<\/a>, received a full-year 2026 Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Institute for Citizens &amp; Scholars. She will use the fellowship during her fourth year on the tenure track to advance her manuscript in progress, <em>Securing the Crisis: Race and the Poetics of Risk.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Passion for the topic stems from a creative nonfiction piece, &#8220;At Risk\u201d by Jourdan Imani Keith, which explores the dissonance in how the label &#8220;at risk&#8221; is applied differently to humans versus endangered animal species. For example, when applied to humans (e.g., &#8220;at-risk youth&#8221;), it signals susceptibility to poor life outcomes; when applied to animals, it triggers legal protections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kong-Chow\u2019s personal experience living as a high school student in Florida during Hurricane Katrina also influences the work. The writing that emerged in Katrina\u2019s aftermath felt reductive, deepening her investment in a humanistic treatment of the subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cRisk is so embedded in everyday culture (risk-taking, risk aversion), yet it is rarely foregrounded as the explicit subject of artistic work, even though it operates as an atmospheric presence throughout cultural production,\u201d says Kong-Chow. \u201cThe book traces how the language and logic of risk (including financial, environmental, epidemiological, and actuarial risk) is shaped by creative and humanistic expression across multiple media.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The book examines how risk, typically a quantitative concept in economics and the social sciences, permeates art, literature, visual culture, and performance. It proceeds chronologically from 2001 onward, with each chapter organized around a distinct meaning or manifestation of risk in the 21st century. Kong-Chow covers topics such as national security risk and petrofiction, environmental risk, financial risk, subprime mortgage, and property risk, epidemics and pandemic risk and public health, and actuarial science, insurance, and life expectancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The final product will be an academic book. It will also allow Kong-Chow to travel locally and nationally for archival work: to the Louisiana Gulf region for research on the Hurricane Katrina chapter, and to the Rhode Island Historical Society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by<a href=\"https:\/\/cands.org\/\"> Institute for Citizens &amp; Scholars<\/a>, seeks to increase the presence of outstanding junior faculty committed to campus engagement and thought-provoking research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. For the 2026 cohort, 13 junior faculty members received 12-month Fellowships and 16 received six-month Fellowships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Janet Kong-Chow, assistant professor, secures a 12-month Citizens &amp; Scholars Career Enhancement Fellowship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5153,"featured_media":19505,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[340,7,360],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-spotlights","category-news","category-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19506,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19504\/revisions\/19506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}