UNM MFA alum awarded postdoctoral fellowship at Center for Regional Studies

The University of New Mexico's Center for Regional Studies (CRS) has selected Emma Ressel, a UNM Master of Fine Arts alum, as its 2025-26 postdoctoral research fellow.

CRS annually awards this fellowship to support scholars whose research aligns with the center's mission to discover, create, preserve, disseminate and promote a culture of broad inquiry within and beyond the UNM community. The center advances UNM's goal of fostering global perspectives through academic and research opportunities led by expert faculty who generate new and valuable sources of knowledge.

To qualify for the fellowship, recipients must hold a Ph.D. or MFA completed prior to the start date of July 1 and demonstrate both scholarly promise and a research focus that supports the CRS mission.

Ressel earned her Bachelor of Arts in photography from Bard College and her Master of Fine Arts from UNM. She will conduct her postdoctoral research at CRS during the 2025-26 academic year.

"I am very thankful to the Center for Regional Studies for supporting this work," Ressel said. "At a time when arts funding is scarce-both for artists and institutions-I hope this project demonstrates the value of continued artistic research into photo history and museums in the region. I see so much potential for artists to work with museums and archives to deliver research and histories to a wider audience in inventive and effective ways, and I look forward to honing my work at this exciting juncture of disciplines."

Ressel was a recipient of the Film Photo Student Project Award and previously held an Emerging Artist Fellowship at Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, where she presented a solo exhibition in May 2024. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Her MFA thesis exhibition, Extant Erosions, was accompanied by a self-published catalog and was on view in Albuquerque earlier this June.

In addition to Ressel, Joseph Ukockis was also named a postdoctoral fellow. Ukockis received his Ph.D. in History from UNM last spring with a focus on Native history and Borderlands. His book project explored the strategic relationships that Mescalero Apaches made with their neighbors from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and links seemingly disparate stories-concerning various ancestors across vast homelands over two centuries-together with the land (i.e., place names).

As a Center for Regional Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, Ukockis will spend the year adapting material from his dissertation, continuing to connect to the community on the Mescalero Reservation in developing the project, researching and drafting additional chapters, and creating maps from place names and archival data to accompany the book.

At the 2025 Western History Association Conference, he presented, "Plains Ndé and Pecos: Strategic Relationships in the Age of 'Reconquest,'" which was based on a chapter from his dissertation/book, as part of a discussion panel titled "New Directions in Apache Studies, Part II: Resilience, Revitalization, and Self-Determination."

The CRS postdoctoral fellowship includes a $50,000 award, distributed in 12 monthly payments, along with a $2,000 research stipend to support travel and related expenses. Fellows also receive dedicated office space at the Center for Regional Studies.

For more information about the Center for Regional Studies, visit crsinfo.unm.edu.