The Moody Fellows Mentorship Program is designed to pair undergraduate fellows with Humanities graduate student mentors to foster an additional layer of research support. Graduate mentors provide guidance in both small-scale group exchanges and one-on-one check-ins, helping fellows navigate various aspects of running a humanities and/or arts-based project. Fellows are often paired with mentors outside their own field of research. Gaining experience speaking fluently across disciplines is an added benefit to mentor and mentee both.
What questions each fellow chooses to field their assigned graduate mentor are entirely up to the individual. Possible topics include big picture questions down to logistics and best practices - questions like how to approach a faculty member to serve as an advisor, how to access an archive, how to set research goals, how to write an abstract, how to hold oneself accountable to research deadlines etc.
Stanislav Panin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion studying contemporary spirituality with the focus on the ways in which it transforms in response to technological and political changes. His dissertation deals with alternative spirituality in the Soviet Union and aims to describe main building blocks of Soviet and post-Soviet esoteric narratives. In the dissertation, Stanislav explores alternative spirituality as an instrument of preservation of personal autonomy in the context of authoritarian society as well as the place of alternative spirituality in Soviet engineering culture. Some of his recent works deal with the early history of the Internet in Russia, conspiracy theories, and the paranormal in Russian science fiction. Aside from more traditional traditional humanistic research, Stanislav is interested in digital humanities and enjoys programming.
Moody Mentors
Stanislav Panin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion studying contemporary spirituality with the focus on the ways in which it transforms in response to technological and political changes. His dissertation deals with alternative spirituality in the Soviet Union and aims to describe main building blocks of Soviet and post-Soviet esoteric narratives. In the dissertation, Stanislav explores alternative spirituality as an instrument of preservation of personal autonomy in the context of authoritarian society as well as the place of alternative spirituality in Soviet engineering culture. Some of his recent works deal with the early history of the Internet in Russia, conspiracy theories, and the paranormal in Russian science fiction. Aside from more traditional traditional humanistic research, Stanislav is interested in digital humanities and enjoys programming.
Christopher Nicholson earned a BA in English literature and BS in ecology from SUNY Plattsburgh in 2019, and, after spending time living and working on a vegetable farm, an MA in English literature with a concentration in ecocriticism from the University of Montana in 2022. He is currently enrolled in the doctoral program in English at Rice University. His primary research interest is extinction studies, which most often brings him to works of speculative and science fiction, as reflected in his MA thesis on James Bradley’s Ghost Species and Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander. However, he is also pursuing projects examining poetry, nature writing, and scientific and journalistic non-fiction, as well as considering the neighboring theoretical frameworks of the Anthropocene, posthumanism, and animal studies.
Bohan Zhang is a third-year PhD student in the Department of History. His research focuses on the history of America in the world, with a particular emphasis on Hawaii's role at the crossroads of the U.S. empire and East Asia during the long twentieth century. Prior to joining Rice, he earned a bachelor's degree in history from Tsinghua University in Beijing and completed two master’s degrees—one in American history from the University of Oxford and another in international relations from the University of Chicago. In his free time, Bohan enjoys visiting UNESCO World Heritage sites and national parks, performing Pingshu (a traditional Chinese storytelling folk art), and playing table tennis.
Emily Lampert is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the History Department. She is broadly interested in histories of gender and Atlantic slavery, empire, and reproduction. Her dissertation works to understand how late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britons, especially abolitionists, understood enslaved reproduction and “slave breeding” through the lens of the newly formed United States (and, in particular, Virginia). She is originally from Washington state and dearly misses the evergreen trees and the cold but admits that Houston has much better food than Bellingham. When she is not working on her dissertation, she spends a lot of her time working with undergraduate students at Rice, whether as a consultant in the CAPC, a FWIS instructor, or now as a graduate mentor for the Moody Fellows program. In her (limited) free time, she enjoys reading romantasy books, eating pho and tteokbokki, going thrifting/antiquing, and annoying her cat, Pippa.