July 3, 2024
Awards, Graduate

Graduate students in the English Department have been awarded dissertation fellowships from various sources.


Rowshan Chowdhury, Mitia Nath, Thakshala Tissera, and Janell Tryon received summer dissertation fellowships from the Graduate School to help support their research and dissertation writing. They were among a group of HFA graduate students who received funding.

Patricia Matthews received a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate School.


Grayson Chong received a World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP) Decolonial Global Studies (DGS)-Mellon Summer Dissertation Fellowship.


Alejandro Beas Murillo and Timothy Ong were awarded Summer Research Awards from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. The awards were intended to support graduate students in the beginning stages of writing their dissertations. 

Alejandro Beas Murillo worked on the first chapter of his dissertation analyzing forms of Afro-Caribbean resistance, the legacies of marronage, and kinship in two texts by Dionne Brand.

Timothy Ong in the Department of English worked on his dissertation prospectus, which outlines his research on U.S. military imperialism and its intimate link with militarized ecologies in the Asia-Pacific region. His work included assembling the archive from which he drew his analysis of U.S. imperial formation and the militarized logics of planetary life management focused on the Asia-Pacific region. Through the prospectus, Ong articulated the theoretical and methodological foundation for his dissertation that makes visible the connections between U.S. imperialism and its complicity in speeding up ecological collapse through militarization.


Stacie Klinowski, Nicole O'Connell, and Jaclyn Ordway were awarded Elbow Summer Fellowships. Named after Peter Elbow, the Elbow Summer Fellowship has two goals: 1) to offer financial support for students to focus on writing progress, and 2) to bring together a small group of fellows who can create accountability routines — share feedback, build community, exchange writing practices — that last beyond the fellowship.


This article was updated in November 2024.