Trinity University’s Kathryn Vomero Santos Named 2026-27 National Humanities Center Fellow

On a campus where ideas are meant to travel beyond the classroom, Trinity University English Professor Kathryn Vomero Santos, Ph.D., studies how language, performance, and power intersect across time and place.

Now, that work is taking her to one of the most prestigious stages in the humanities. Santos has been named a 2026-27 Fellow at the National Humanities Center, joining a cohort of 29 scholars chosen from 450 applicants nationwide. The fellowship will allow Santos to advance her latest project, Mischiefs Manifold: A Cultural History of Sycorax, while joining a community dedicated to collaborative inquiry.

“While Mischiefs Manifold is a project about an absent female character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Shakespeare will ultimately play a small role in the story I seek to tell about the many artistic and intellectual afterlives Sycorax continues to inspire,” says Santos. “I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do this work in conversation with a remarkable group of humanities scholars from a wide range of fields because I see this transmedial, transhistorial book about Sycorax as a truly interdisciplinary project.”

Santos teaches courses on Shakespeare and his afterlives, early modern literature, translation studies, Borderlands studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and she regularly mentors undergraduate researchers. As a co-founder of the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva, Santos has helped foster critical and creative work rooted in the arts, cultures, and languages of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.

Santos’ scholarship and teaching show the humanities in motion. Tracing how texts are translated, adapted, and reimagined over time reveals how inherited works come to reflect the values and tensions of the societies that inherit them. From this perspective, her work offers a lens on the value of the humanities, showing how people make meaning, how language carries history, and how culture shapes public life.

“The book that I will be working on during this fellowship grows directly from a seminar on “Absent Women in Shakespeare” that I regularly teach at Trinity,” says Santos. “I look forward to carrying my students’ insights and curiosities into my research and returning to campus with a renewed commitment to the types of interdisciplinary inquiry that make the arts and humanities so vital.”