The College of the Liberal Arts’ graduate programs offer a wide range of opportunities within the humanities, languages, and social sciences for students to complete research.
Our innovative centers and institutes facilitate interdepartmental and interdisciplinary research and outreach on particular topics of academic or societal importance. These—in addition to our dozens of research labs—allow undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty to work alongside each other to examine our past and present through various lenses to address and solve our most prominent societal issues and prepare future generations to create a better tomorrow.
Graduate Research
A great way to enhance your graduate experience and develop skills that will be attractive to future employers is through research. Participate in research and get to know faculty on a different level, in a different setting.
Grad ResearchInternational StudentPublic Policy
Halima Binte Islam
’25
Public Policy (master's degree)
Public Policy (master's degree)
One of the highlights of her time at Penn State has been the opportunity to engage in hands-on research. Halima is especially focused on projects related to digital inclusion and AI privacy policy. She is currently conducting a systematic review on smartphone ownership in developing regions, exploring how access to technology can empower communities.
Grad Research
Ashleigh McDonald
Doctoral Student in Communication Arts and Sciences
Doctoral Student in Communication Arts and Sciences
Ashleigh McDonald has devoted her studies to researching the narratives and memories attached to mental institutions, prisons, hospitals and other “dark, unanalyzed places” commonly thought to be haunted.
Grad Research
Katherine Godfrey
History Post-Doc Teaching Fellow
History Post-Doc Teaching Fellow
Katherine Godfrey’s research examines how Indigenous matrilineal kinship networks shaped social and political life in early colonial Colombia. Her forthcoming book explores the critical yet often overlooked role of Indigenous women in supporting and influencing the Spanish Empire’s ambitions, challenging male-centered narratives of conquest. By centering women’s experiences, her work reveals new perspectives on identity, power, and colonial encounters in the early Americas.
Grad Research
Maggie Hernandez
’24
Ph.D. Anthropology
Ph.D. Anthropology
Maggie received a five-year, $327,812 Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Transition Award for a Diverse Genomics Workforce from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to support her multifaceted research project, “Noventa Millas: Migration history, genomic ancestry, and health disparities among Cuban immigrants and Cuban-Americans in the United States.”
Grad Research
Alex Herrera
’25
Ph.D. Latin American History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Ph.D. Latin American History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Alex was awarded the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship through the U.S. Department of Education to conduct her dissertation research in Guatemala, where is is examining how transnational networks of Guatemalan, American, and European doctors, public health officials, politicians, city police, and sex workers created and shaped prostitution regulations and medical knowledge about sexually transmitted infections in Guatemala City.
Grad Research
Estilita Maria Cassiani Obeso
’22
Ph.D. Spanish and Linguistics
Ph.D. Spanish and Linguistics
“My research focuses on the use of Creole by a new generation. Palenquero is a Creole language, so my research compares its uses by other speakers, and I am reporting changes in the language. I am also helping teachers at schools in Palenque find better ways to teach Palenquero.”
Faculty Research
There are more than 780 full-time faculty in the College of the Liberal Arts spanning more than fifty disciplines in the liberal arts ranging from anthropology and economics to global security and women’s studies. Our graduate students have the opportunity to find faculty whose interests match theirs and work with the best of the best.
Faculty Research
Sherita Johnson
Director, Africana Research Center
|
Associate Professor of English
Director, Africana Research Center
Associate Professor of English
Johnson recently published the book Mixing: Race, Higher Education, and the Case of Clyde Kennard,” with several co-authors. The book examines the life and death of Kennard, a Korean War veteran whose attempts to enroll at Hattiesburg’s then all-white Mississippi Southern College — now the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) — in the 1950s were met with the institutional racism of the late Jim Crow era.
Faculty Research
Oleksandr Gon and Mariia Grytsenko
Two scholars from war-torn Ukraine have found a welcoming temporary home at Penn State, thanks to the Fulbright Scholar Program. Mariia Grytsenko and Oleksandr Gon, both faculty members at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, were selected by Fulbright to spend the 2025-26 academic year housed in the College of the Liberal Arts’ Department of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Faculty Research
Daryl Cameron and Alan Wagner
Cameron and Wagner, collaborated with other scholars on an article assessing how empathy for and from robots is considered from an interdisciplinary perspective. They published their work in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Faculty Research
Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy
In 2022, Brandt and Purdy brought together scholars to Penn State for a College of the Liberal Arts-funded conference focused on the historical connections between “scientific” racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the malign effects of colonialism and Nazism more than a century later. The conversations that occurred at this conference resulted in the newly published book, “Colonialism and Enlightenment: The Legacy of German Race Theories,” which features 11 essays examining the many ways theories about race posited by 18th century philosophers like Immanuel Kant influenced later forms of racism in the 19th and 20th centuries and even today.
Faculty Research
Matthew Restall
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology, and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies
|
Director of Latin American Studies
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology, and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies
Director of Latin American Studies
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History recently wrote a book, “The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus,” tracing the life and many afterlives of Columbus. Throughout the book, Restall separates fact from fiction and seeks to understand why Columbus continues to mean different things to different people.
Faculty Research
Jacob Holland-Lulewicz
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Holland-Lulewicz is among a group of archaeologists who published research on how oyster shells discarded over thousands of years by Indigenous people have helped protect and preserve the barrier islands off the coast of Georgia.