Graduate Student Fellowships

Deadline February 13, 2012

The Humanities Research Center awards competitive fellowships to advanced graduate students who are researching and writing their dissertations. During the appointment period, the fellowship recipients meet regularly to share work in progress with one another in an interdisciplinary writing workshop. 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.
 
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.

Says Valerie Olson, a former fellow from the Anthropology department of her fellowship experience: “Devoting my time to writing (rather than taking a paying job), allowed me to prepare a dissertation that looks (according to my dissertation advisor) more like a book manuscript than a dissertation. As a result, I will be able to generate publications and perhaps a book within the next two years. In this difficult job market, the fellowship program provides students with the ability to publish articles, which in turn makes for more competitive Curriculum Vitae.”

The 2011-12 Fellows

	Ata Anzali, Religious Studies Department, Dissertation Writing Fellow "Towards a Broader Genealogy of Islamic Mysticism: Deconstructing 'Irfan' as a Comparative Category in Modern Persian Literature" Jeffrey J. Kripal, Dissertation Director Anzali investigates the reasons behind the centrality of the term irfan in contemporary Persian literature as a normative category used to refer to mystical aspects of Islam. The usage stands in striking contrast to the rest of Muslim world, in which the traditional term tasawwuf (Sufism) has been in use. Developing a genealogy of the term irfan, Anzali argues that a strategic alliance between some of the 'ulama, statesmen and intellectuals succeeded, by means of military, political, as well as intellectual power, in creating an "irfanian" discourse.
	Jacob Kolman, Philosophy Department, Sarofim Teaching Fellow "An Integrated Theory of Epistemic Normativity Types and Belief-Psychology" Baruch Brody, Dissertation Director Epistemology has traditionally focused on characterizing the content of norms for belief, sometimes neglecting structural issues about these norms.  Are they categorical or conditional?  Should they be construed as imperatives?  Does our interpretation of epistemic normativity cohere with a plausible psychological account of the mental state, belief, to which it refers?  Kolman proposes a comprehensive account on just these questions.
	Chad Pevateaux, Religious Studies Department, Sarofim Teaching Fellow "What Mystics May Come: Forming More Perfect Unions from Pragmatism to Posthumanism" Jeffrey J. Kripal, Dissertation Director Pevateaux compares how thinkers in the “spiritual but not religious” currents of culture have drawn on various mystical practices to explore the affinities among three types of union: (1) mystical experience; (2) embodied intimacy; and (3) politics. If a darkness of unknowing that negates any human concepts of the transcendent marks the mystical, if desire of the other takes us outside of ourselves in an ecstatic loss of control, and if democracy involves perpetually revising by opening to new perspectives to come, then they all exhibit a common non-power at the heart of their power, and thus share similar problems and opportunities.
	Jennifer Rickel, English Department, Dean's Sarofim Teaching Fellow "Narrative States: Human Rights Discourse in Contemporary Literature" Betty Joseph, Dissertation Director Rickel examines how contemporary Anglophone texts concerned with violence in Africa, the Caribbean, and India translate politically situated occurrences, such as genocide in Rwanda, into literary testimony that endeavors to unite a cosmopolitan readership in support of international human rights projects. Often, portrayals of literature as testimony depoliticize crises resulting from failed development and the growth of multinational capital. Rickel critiques literary humanitarianism, which operates according to the conviction one may engage in a humanitarian act reading, and thereby witnessing, stories of trauma. Rickel shows how the literary incarnation of narrator as testifier and reader as witness reflects power relations between states, citizens, international collectivities, and extra-national individuals.
	Robin Sager, History Department, Dissertation Writing Fellow "States of Suffering: Marital Cruelty in Antebellum Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin" John B. Boles, Dissertation Director Sager’s project employs a comparative framework to examine cruelty between husbands and wives in a traditional southern state (Virginia), a ‘new’ frontier southern state (Texas), and a recently settled frontier in the Midwest (Wisconsin) from 1840 to 1860. Based on more than 1,500 divorce cases, Sager argues that marriages were often contested relationships in which husbands and wives struggled for the power to define and enforce particular gender roles. Historians have generally categorized women’s violence as trivial, rare, or defensive. Sager corrects this oversight by demonstrating that women were indeed capable, and often willing, to commit a wide variety of cruelties within marriage.
	Jayme Yeo, English Department, Sarofim Teaching Fellow "Imagining Unity: The Politics of Transcendence in Donne, Lanyer, Crashaw, and Milton" Edward Snow, Dissertation Director “Imagining Unity” reimagines the relationship between politics and theology in the early seventeenth century by analyzing how newly-emergent political discourses informed ideas of transcendence in British devotional poetry. In the half century preceding England’s Civil War, the rising popularity of republicanism, paired with the enduring turmoil of the Reformation, led to a widespread sense of national disunity. In the shadow of these troubles, devotional poets reworked ideas of transcendence that they had inherited from medieval Catholicism to provide a sense of national cohesion in the midst of a changing political landscape.

Click here to see a list of past graduate student fellows

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.