The fellowship program, created in 2022, accelerates and amplifies the work of outstanding Indiana University faculty poised to become national and international leaders in their respective areas. The program’s goal is to lift and promote IU’s already stellar arts and humanities communities and ensure their continued prestige with an eye to promoting research that makes the campuses national and international centers for scholarship.
The fellowship — supported by the IU Office of the President and IU Research and administered by the university’s assistant vice president for research — awards $50,000 of flexible funding to each recipient as they pursue innovative research and creative projects.
Matwijkiw, who held the prestigious title of Fulbright Distinguished Chair of Public International Law from 2019-20, also serves as an affiliated faculty in the Institute for European Studies at IU Bloomington. She is an expert in ethics, human rights and philosophy of law at the national and international levels, and sits on the boards and committees of various journals, presses and international programs that specialize in research on the intersection between law, cultural issues and values.
Her interdisciplinary interests are focused on stakeholder frameworks and their analytical and evaluative potential to conceptualize, prescribe and/or critique dynamic developments in law that affect international human rights, democracy and development.
She is currently involved in several research projects that promote internationalization. In 2024, she contributed as an invited expert to international programs/organizations in Austria, Colombia, Croatia, Italy and the Netherlands.
Matwijkiw will use her fellowship funds to explore stakeholder philosophy and international law as it pertains to the United Nations rule of law. In particular, it is the norm at the highest level of international law that is going to be the subject-matter of ethical and philosophical inquiries, and these include emerging norms in the form of crimes like “ecocide” and “grand corruption.”
In addition to funding, the fellows will gain access to professional development opportunities focused on grant writing, scholarly communication with the public, media training, digital scholarship and more. Specifically, Matwijkiw will be directing research events and activities that involve both undergraduate and graduate students and hosting a guest lecturer from the University of Zagreb, who shares Matwijkiw’s interdisciplinary approach to international law. The deliverables for the IUPAH Fellowship also encompass publications.
Last year, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, IU Northwest Assistant Professor of Sculpture, was named an IU Presidential Arts and Humanities fellow. He used his funds to work on his project “Floating Monuments: Mecca Flats,” an inflatable architectural monument that looked at themes of erasure and disinvestment on Chicago’s South and West Sides while celebrating Chicago’s Black Renaissance.
Read about all 2024-25 IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows here
