2025-2026 Harris Faculty Fellowships

Dear Colleagues,

Each year, Grinnell College awards up to three Harris Faculty Fellowships, which provide recipients with a full year to focus on research. Harris Faculty Fellowships also provide funding for recipients’ departments to hire term visiting faculty for the Fellowship year.

Recognizing with gratitude the good work of the members of the Committee for the Support of Faculty Scholarship, who reviewed a stellar roster of proposals, I am pleased to announce that Molly MacInnes (Chemistry), Laura Ng (Anthropology), and Meredith Paker (Economics) have won Harris Faculty Fellowships for the 2025-2026 academic year.

Below, you will find descriptions of the projects that they will pursue during their pre-tenure research leaves. Their innovative research explores significant issues of our day, including the effects of heavy metals on our environment; migration and racialized violence in the history of the United States; and labor in times of significant economic change.

Please join me in congratulating Molly, Laura, and Meredith on their outstanding accomplishments.

Sincerely,

Gerald (Jerry) Seaman
Interim Dean of the College

Molly MacInnes

MacInnes’s project, “Electrochemical Characterization of Ion Adsorption at Solid-Liquid Interfaces,” aims to better understand the adsorption of dissolved metal ions on solid metal oxide surfaces. Specifically, she is interested in the adsorption of lanthanides and actinides, a group of heavy metals that are increasingly used in clean and nuclear energy technologies. These elements have ecotoxic effects when released into the environment, and MacInnes’s project will elucidate the fundamental chemistry of these elements to work toward more efficient recycling and remediation methods. Her project builds on work that she and her undergraduate students have conducted with cerium (a lanthanide ion) and cobalt (a transition metal). She will conduct this work in collaboration with Dr. Stosh Kozimor’s group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Laura Ng

Ng’s project, “The Archaeology of Labor, Race, and Transnationalism in Rural Wyoming Chinatowns,” will delve into the history of the Chinatowns of Evanston and Rock Springs, Wyoming. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these were Wyoming’s two largest Chinese communities, housing many migrants who came from China’s Pearl River Delta to work for the Union Pacific Railroad Company. Both communities were connected to the 1885 Chinese Massacre, in which 28 Chinese coal miners were murdered by a white mob. Ng’s project will assess racial violence in the region, Chinese responses to racism, and the transnational experiences of Chinese laborers through oral histories with the descendants of these communities, analysis of historical immigration records, and comparison of archaeological data from Evanston and Rock Springs with several villages in the Pearl River Delta. Her work will support the nomination of Evanston and Rock Springs as National Historic Landmarks.

Meredith Paker

Paker's project, “Adapting Livelihoods: Work, Resilience, and Transformation in the Shifting Economies of Interwar and 1980s Britain,” will make an innovative contribution to labor history by studying the lifetime career paths and family structures of a sample of 20th-century British workers. While many studies of labor history focus on snapshots that capture an individual’s employment status and wage at a single point in time, Paker will use government records of individuals’ complete employment histories, census data, archived oral histories, and other data on industries and households. Her project will provide rich insights on issues like women’s participation in a changing workforce and how workers responded to the growth and decline of industries over the twentieth century.