Maijastina Kahlos’s project, “Encountering Migrants and Using ‘Barbarians’ in the Late Roman World”, examines the mechanisms through which Romans engaged with migrants in Late Antiquity (300–500 CE). She analyses these mechanisms at both the conceptual and rhetorical levels—focusing on knowledge ordering, ethnicization, and religious othering—and at the socio-economic and political levels, including the recruitment of soldiers and settlers and the exploitation of enslaved people. The project asks how the host society constructed and mobilised images of migrants for its own purposes.

Maijastina Kahlos will be at the Collegium as a SCAS-Nordic Fellow during the spring term of 2027.

As a population geneticist and Human Past Residential Fellow, Sohini Ramachandran’s project aims to advance ancestry inference methods by integrating ancient and modern human genomes to distinguish the roles of population history and natural selection in shaping genetic diversity. In collaboration with colleagues at the Center for the Human Past, Professor Ramachandran will address "alignment problems" inherent in mixed-membership clustering, particularly in the context of analyses integrating ancient and modern genomes. Her project has two primary goals: first, studying the robustness of clustering results and allele frequency trajectories over the last 10,000 years to identify targets of natural selection; and second, analyzing patterns of identity-by-descent (IBD) sharing to reconstruct ancient demographic histories and mating practices. Ultimately, she aims to provide more stable tools for studying human expansions—such as the Neolithic and Bantu movements—while countering the extremist weaponization of genetic research through more accurate readings of population variation.

Sohini Ramachandran will be at SCAS during the spring term of 2027 as a Human Past Senior Fellow.

The aim of Rick de Villiers’s project, “Ctrl Z: Undoing Narratives”, is to explore how retraction and recantation take shape in experimental writing of the 20th and 21st Century. The guiding motif for this project is the palinode: a literary-philosophical form used to reject one’s own previous writing. Out of this conjunction of the poetic and the philosophical, two types of literary retraction emerge. The first type is motivated by fear and thus serves to deflect retribution. The second, by contrast, aspires to self-effacement: it openly acknowledges errors and second thoughts, regardless of personal interests or outside influence. Despite apparently diverging motives, however, the two types are dialectically entangled and mutually reinforcing: humiliation (or its avoidance) is never without the effects of humility, nor is humility ever free from self-serving impulses. The project will culminate in a monograph which centres on this dynamism. Its aim is to probe various literary instances of the palinodal – whether withdrawals, recantations, reformulations, self-censorship or cancel cultures. Through close readings of various texts – among them works by Samuel Beckett, Anna Burns, Cormac McCarthy, Bertolt Brecht, Marlene van Niekerk, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Rachel Cusk – the project teases out the artistic and political ambivalence that underpins the literature of undoing.

Rick de Villiers is an Iso Lomso Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). He will be at SCAS during the autumn term of 2026 as part of his international residency.