Ten HFA Graduate Students Receive Summer Dissertation Fellowship Funding from Graduate School

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Ten graduate students in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA) have received summer dissertation fellowships from the Graduate School to help support their research and dissertation writing. 

Eight students received $8,000, including Rafael Freire, Comparative Literature; Rowshan Chowdhury, English; Mitia Nath, English; Thakshala Tissera, English; Janell Tryon, English; Bing Xia, History; Thomas Daventry-Shea, Philosophy; Celia Sainz Delgado, Spanish and Portuguese Program. 

Two students—Yosho Miyata in the Department of Linguistics and Jia Zhang in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies—received $4,000 from the Graduate School in split-funded fellowships with each student’s department. 

The fellowship program is structured to include writing support throughout the summer. Students either participated in an in-person or self-directed dissertation writing retreat the first week of June, then join a bi-weekly virtual writing support group to check in on writing progress, share challenges or frustrations, and write in community for the remainder of the summer. 

The aim of the program is to alleviate some of the sense of isolation dissertators often experience, especially towards the end of the writing process when they are more likely to be burned out, according to Associate Director for Grants & Fellowships Heidi Bauer-Clapp, PhD’16.