Department of English

Summer Funding Recipients Report Back

A number of students received funding this past summer to support various scholarly endeavors, ranging from work in archives, to attendance at special institutes, to conference-related travel. Some are excerpted below.

Tanja Beljanski (PhD student): "I attended the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory, which allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the critical and methodological approach I might take up in my dissertation. This experience was complemented by more 'hands-on' research at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, where I studied archives relating to novelist Don DeLillo." 

Kyle Huskin (PhD student): "I attended Rare book School at the University of Pennsylvania, where I took 'The Bible and the Histories of Reading', with Dr. Peter Stallybrass. My experience working directly with biblical texts dating from the fifth to the twenty-first centuries will be particularly valuable for my research on medieval women's reading practices, which were grounded in religious texts."

Eric Loy (PhD student): "I attended Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, taking a course on book history. Working with UVA's extensive special collections, as well as taking a day-long field trip to the Library of Congress, our course traced major technological developments in manuscript and book production over several millennia. The course provided a historical and technical foundation for my dissertation, which focuses on contemporary experimental literature and the future of the book as a material object" (a project that is also informed by Eric's extensive work with the Blake Archive). 

Scott O'Neill (PhD student): "I travelled to the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I researched the history of friars and the mysterious spaces known the sixteenth century as 'friars' cells'. The materials I studied while there have helped me to piece together the secretive function of these cells -- in addition to other monastic uses of space -- which will prove useful in my dissertation on Renaissance drama."
 

Debarati Roy (MA student): "I presented a chapter of my MA thesis at the International Conference on Social Science and the Humanities, held at the University of Washington's Rome Center [in Rome, Italy]. The feedback I received helped me to explore further the tension between oral testimony and official history in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India." 

Dan Singleton (PhD student): "I travelled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Caetlin Benson-Allott, a senior scholar of media spectatorship (a core concept in my dissertation) and the new editor of Cinema Journal."