The Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Research Fellowship has been awarded to the following individuals to perform research in UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections.
2026: Jennifer Alpers
Jennifer Alpers is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Davis. She earned her BA in History at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation, “Devil of a Time: Imperiled Children, Race, and Coalition Building during the Satanic Panic, 1975-1995 United States,” aims to expand our knowledge of the moral panic that emerged in the United States in the late twentieth century through centering race, gender, and childhood. Though often viewed as a bizarre anomaly driven by a growing religious right, the “Satanic Panic,” as it is often called, offers an important look into white middle-class anxieties which led to a broad coalition of activists who organized to “protect the children.” Through chapters on fears about the AIDS crisis, drunk driving, daycare centers, fantasy role playing-games, pornography, and music, her research seeks to analyze the ways parents worried about threats to their children’s safety, and how these worries—on both the left and right—reflected and reinforced white middle-class anxieties about race, gender, and hierarchy during the 1980s and 1990s. Historians have often viewed the culture wars as a linear progression from the 1970s to the present. However, a close examination of coalition building during the Satanic Panic proves this assumption to be much more complicated. Her project not only illuminates the political strength of projecting childhood at risk, a strategy that drew crusaders across a broad spectrum of political and religious beliefs, but also reveals how the moral and political logic of the late twentieth century was intertwined with shifting notions of childhood innocence and race.
2025: Joseph Wei
Dr. Joseph Wei is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia. A scholar of Asian American literature and literary communities, his research spans Asian American poetry and poetics, literature and sociology, and critical refugee studies. He is currently completing his first book, Asian American Literary Organizing, 1970s to the Present, which investigates the role of Asian American literary organizations — from Kearny Street Workshop to Kundiman — in realizing and sustaining models of literary production outside mainstream literary institutions.
2024: Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Radio-Television-Film department at the University of Texas at Austin researching the historical development of deficit financing in the US television industry. During his fellowship, Johnson accessed various collections in the Performing Arts Collection, including the Lemack (Brad) Collection, Cal Naylor Production Files, Becker production files, Veronica Mars, and Melnick (Daniel) papers in support of his dissertation, "The Development of Deficit Financing in the U.S. Television Industry, 1970–2022."
2023: Lina-Maria Murillo
Lina-Maria Murillo is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and History at the University of Iowa. For her research fellowship, Murillo accessed the papers of UCSB faculty emeritus Garrett Hardin, an ardent population control activist, in support of an upcoming monograph, "Borderlands of Abortion Care,” a historical analysis of abortion, demographic change, and white supremacy, its confluence and politics from the 1850s to the present.
2022: Terezita Romo
Terezita “Tere” Romo is a Lecturer and Affiliate Faculty in the Chicana/o Studies Department at UC, Davis. Romo’s project “Indigeneity in Chicana/o/x Art” focused on Chicana/o/x artists who incorporate indigenous images and/or rituals in their art. She accessed the Library’s California Ethnic & Multicultural Archives (CEMA), with its wide array of collections that represent the cultural, artistic, ethnic, gender, and racial diversity that characterizes California’s population.
2021: Brian Chidester
Brian Chidester is a filmmaker and scholar. He researched materials in the Bob Bertram Collection relating to Eden Ahbez for support in "As the Wind: The Enchanted Life of Eden Ahbez," a feature-length documentary about Ahbez’s musical career.
