The Humanities Research Center will award competitive fellowships to advanced graduate students who are researching and writing their dissertations. During the appointment period, the fellowship recipients will meet regularly to share work in progress with one another in an interdisciplinary writing workshop and must maintain their residency at Rice. Students in the humanities or engaging in humanistic study, broadly construed, are eligible to apply. Applications are reviewed by the Faculty Advisory Panel of the HRC.

Award

Full stipend support (August 16 - May 15) and a waiver of tuition fees. The stipend is dispersed in semi-monthly installments and depends upon continued participation in the writing workshop. The fellows are encouraged to attend relevant HRC-sponsored talks and otherwise participate in the intellectual life of the Center

Students who are awarded significant funding from external sources, but who will nevertheless fall short of typical stipend levels at Rice, may apply for supplementary funding from the HRC to cover the difference.

Some fellows will be awarded Dissertation Completion Fellowships, which require a spring graduation. Dissertation Completion Fellows are expected to work full-time on their dissertations and may not accept any regular paid employment on or off campus including teaching appointments. Other fellows will be awarded Sarofim Teaching Fellowships, which require the fellow to teach one course during the academic year within their departments or the Freshman Seminar program. Sarofim Teaching Fellows are also excluded from other employment and are expected to make significant progress on their dissertations.

Applicants should not indicate a preference for one fellowship or the other; the HRC, in consultation with department chairs and dissertation advisors, will determine which is the most advantageous award for each fellow.

Qualifications

Enrollment at Rice University with good standing.
Comprehensive exams passed and dissertation proposal approved by the advisor.
Compliance with Rice policy requirements for time to degree.
By the start of the fellowship year, applicants must have used up all stipend support awarded through their departments. Typically, this follows the fifth year of enrollment but varies by department.

Application Process

Applicants are encouraged to submit multiple files at the HRC's Document Upload page (available starting mid-December: check here for more information). If preferred, you may submit electronic documents to hrc@rice.edu (subject: Dissertation Writing Fellowship). Please include your last name in the filenames of any electronic documents you send. You may send a hard copy of your application through campus mail (Humanities Research Center - MS 620). You may also bring your application to the HRC Office at Herring Hall 306.

The following materials must be received by the HRC by the application deadline:

Cover letter
Curriculum vitae
Dissertation description of no more than 1000 words
Unofficial transcript
One-page status report on the dissertation

Your dissertation advisor should send a letter of recommendation directly to the HRC. In addition, your department chair should send a signed questionnaire directly to the HRC.

The Humanities Research Center awards full stipend support to advanced doctoral students who are completing research and writing their dissertations and expect to finish by the end of the academic year. In addition, this year the center is able to award three Sarofim Teaching Fellowships, whose recipients teach a one-semester course in their departments to gain significant teaching experience. The entire cohort meets regularly throughout the year to present their works in progress and to exchange critical responses with their peers in different disciplines.

2009-10 Fellows

These fellowships are made possible through the generous support of Robert Quartel ’72 and Michela English, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Sarofim Foundation, and the Gilder Foundation.

	Lina Dib, anthropology, Dissertation-Writing Fellow Memory as Concept and Design in Digital Recording Technologies, James D. Faubion, dissertation director Dib examines the research and development of new digital recording technologies, focusing on tools designed to act as prosthetic memory aids. Building on the growing fields of digital humanities and social studies of science, she argues for the emergence of new social and cultural orders – defined by unique relationships between humans and machines.
	Katherine Fitzgerald Wyatt, history, Sarofim Teaching Fellow From Appalachians to Americans: Women, Reform, and Internal Colonialism in Kentucky, 1870s-1930s, John Boles, dissertation director Fitzgerald- Wyatt critically examines representations of race, specifically constructions of whiteness, during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. In considering the influence of both domestic and international events, she suggests that women reformers and missionaries were agents of, rather than passive participants in, American empire.
	David Getman, history, Dissertation-Writing Fellow States of Legitimacy: British Labour, Iraqi Nationalism, and the Rise of Internationalism in the First World War Era, Martin Wiener, dissertation director Getman examines the “invention of Iraq” during and after World War I, when internationalist language was used by several parties for their own purposes, including British leaders seeking to preserve imperialist legitimacy, British advocates for indigenous self-determination, and Iraqi nationalists seeking a “separate national condition.”
	Jeffrey Jackson, English, Sarofim Teaching Fellow Withdrawing from History: Scott, Wordsworth, and Dickens and the Afterlife of the Scottish Enlightenment, Robert Patten, dissertation director Jackson attributes the emergence of British Romanticism and the three-volume novel to Scotland’s assimilation into an increasingly homogenous Britain. He argues that the effacement of Enlightenment communal settings by urbanization fostered the replacement of Scottish-Enlightenment sociability with an individualistic, interior sensibility.
	Cory Ledoux, English, Dissertation-Writing Fellow Revolutionary Traditions: The Idea of Haiti in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature, Caroline Levander, dissertation director Ledoux’s dissertation charts the foundational importance of the Haitian Revolution in U.S. literature, including works by Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He argues that the discourses associated with the revolution shaped the ways in which U.S. authors articulated ideas about race, empire, nation, and citizenship.
	Valerie Olson, anthropology, Dissertation-Writing Fellow Space: An Ethnography of an American Environment, James D. Faubion, dissertation director Olson’s project investigates the logics and politics of making humans into spacefarers and outer space into a human environment. Anchored in fieldwork done at NASA, her dissertation examines how remaking the forms and limits of human/environment interactions is an increasingly productive frontier for post-Cold War American civil astronautics. Though contemporary astronautics discourse and practices, space is emerging as a strategic site for producing scalable knowledge about human ecology and evolution.
	Philip Robichaud, philosophy, Sarofim Teaching Fellow Moral Error, Moral Ignorance, and Moral Responsibility, George Sher, dissertation director Robichaud focuses on the epistemic prerequisites – rather than the more familiar question of metaphysical prerequisites – to moral responsibility, taking into consideration the relevance of moral knowledge and moral error. He questions whether an agent who is ignorant of the moral features of a given action may be held morally responsible for that action.

2008-09 Dissertation-Writing Fellows

These fellowships were made possible through the generous support of the Gilder Foundation, Robert Quartel ’72 and Michela English, Jerry and Nanette Finger, Charles Szalkowski ’70, and Ann Ziker ’08 and Ben Ziker.

	Torin Alexander, religious studies "What Meaneth This?": A Postmodern Theory of African American Religious Experience, Anthony Pinn, dissertation director Alexander investigates the significance of everyday life for the study of African American religious experience. His dissertation proposes that research focusing on microscopic expressions of power will lead to a more robust understanding of African American religion. Moreover, he asserts that the real site of liberation is revealed not so much in collective, communal, and coordinated endeavors, but rather in oppositional practices that are often passed over as irrelevant or insignificant.
	Kara Marler-Kennedy, English Mourning, Violence and the Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Helena Michie and Robert Patten, dissertation directors Marler-Kennedy’s dissertation examines the role of the nineteenth century historical novel as an instrument for the affective development of British readers. This project suggests that the novels captured a highly political relationship between history and grief as integral to the violence that is often necessary in building and destroying the social bonds of community and nation.
	Elitza Ranova, anthropology Re-Inventing Europe: Post-Socialist Change, Culture and Style in Bulgaria, James D. Faubion, dissertation director Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Sofia, Bulgaria, Ranova’s dissertation examines the emergence of a new generation of Bulgarian writers, artists, photographers and other culture producers. Ms. Ranova assesses how the discursive opposition between Western and Eastern Europe is being re-imagined through art, style and fashion in the context of post-socialist Bulgaria’s changing social structure. She has also received an Inter-laboratory Visitor (ILV) Fellowship from Marie Curie SocAnth, an EU-funded program promoting anthropological research in Central and Eastern Europe.
	Abbie Salyers, history The Internment of Memory: Forgetting and Remembering the Japanese American Experience during World War II, Ira Gruber, dissertation director Salyers looks at WWII Japanese Americans’ experience in internment camps and as translators and members of all-Japanese American military units. The dissertation examines the politics of commemorating Japanese American WWII history and the role of individuals and local organizations in inscribing it in public memory. She has also received a Center for Military History (CMH) Museum Fellowship, cosponsored by the National Museum of the U.S. Army.
	Matthew Schunke, religious studies A Phenomenological Response to Naturalist Accounts of Religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal and Steven Crowell, dissertation directors Schunke’s dissertation addresses the ongoing tension in Religious Studies between naturalist methodologies which reduce religious experience to purely natural social-scientific terms and descriptive methodologies which argue that religious experience cannot be explained in non-religious terms. Mr. Schunke singles out the phenomenology of the French philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion as a way to avoid the pitfalls of both naturalist and descriptive methods.

2007-08 Dissertation Writing Fellows

Made possible through the generous support of the Gilder Foundation, Robert Quartel '72 and Charles Szalkowski '70.

	Cecilia Ballí, anthropology Women and Death on the Border: Gender, Territory, and Power in Ciudad Juárez, James D. Faubion, dissertation director Ballí's project focuses on violence towards women along the U.S./Mexican border, especially in Ciudad Juárez. Following eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, her dissertation seeks to expose the frequent murder of women in Juárez, in the absence of any apparent criminal motives, as radically anti-social acts aimed at undoing society through the vicitimization of its most vulnerable members. Ballí relies "on anthropology in order to understand Juárez as a loosely bound but real space [...] where the unfolding of globalizing forces and the constant contentation of authority spell terror and death for poor women."
	Ryan J. Foster, history The Creativity of Nature: the Genesis and Development of F.W.J. Schelling's Naturphilosophie, John H. Zammito, dissertation director Foster's dissertation is an exhaustive intellectual biography of German metaphysical philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Joining recent attempts to revive Schelling's work in defiance of recent trends away from metaphysical thought, Foster focuses on Schelling's early philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) in order to show the ways that philosophy and science can speak to each other in intellectually and ecologically sound ways. By demonstrating a strong sensitivity to the historical moment in which Schelling was working and how that moment influenced his thought, Foster's dissertation will also show how his philosophies of science and nature are still relevant today.
	David Messmer, English Fighting Words: The Politics of Literary Aurality in African American Literature from the Civil War to the Civil Rights, Caroline Levander, dissertation director Messmer's work looks at the crucial role that representations of sound and music play in the formation of an African American literary tradition that spans the years leading to the Civil War through the era of Civil Rights. Through an examination of works by Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and jazz singer Billie Holiday, Mr. Messmer's dissertation first isolates a persistent tension between written and aural forms of cultural expression and then traces the ways in which African American writers utilize that tension to make intrusions into national concepts of racial politics that would otherwise render them silent.
	Ann K. Ziker, history Containing Democracy: Race, Conservative Politics, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-Colonial World, 1948-1968, John B. Boles, dissertation director Ziker’s dissertation examines how the modern American conservative movement took shape around the problems of U.S. foreign policy in a decolonizing world. As anticolonial revolutions remade the international political landscape, the politics of race mingled with public disputes about America’s relationship with newly independent nations in Africa and Asia. She suggests how the twin issues of civil rights at home and human rights abroad helped assemble a new conservative coalition in the United States. Her project aims to bridge the intellectual gap between domestic and foreign historical inquiry