The fellowships support travel and research related to the completion of a dissertation, generation of a publishable peer-edited journal essay, or production of other publishable outcomes. The awards also support transformative experiential-learning experiences for humanities PhDs interested in careers outside academia. “We’re so pleased that the generosity of Edward and MIreille Guiliano is enabling us to extend our support for humanities graduate students in these ways,” said Paula M. Krebs, the executive director of the MLA. “The fellowships will foster ambitious research and will also encourage career exploration for doctoral students. They reinforce the MLA’s commitment to supporting the wide range of options available to graduate students in the humanities.”
The recipients of the Edward Guiliano Global Fellowships were honored on 5 January 2024, during the MLA Annual Convention, held in Philadelphia. The selection committee members were Esther Allen (City Univ. of New York, Baruch Coll.); Daniel Fried (Univ. of Alberta); Genelle Gertz (Washington and Lee Univ.); Tina Lu (Yale Univ.); Stephen Knadler (Spelman Coll.); and Barbara Kosta (Univ. of Arizona).
The recipients of the Edward Guiliano Global Fellowships and their project titles are:
- Sonia Adams (St. John’s Univ.) – “Cultivating Literary Excellence: The Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival as a Learner-Centered Education Model for Orienting Black Diasporic Feminist Literature”
- Ananya Bhardwaj (George Washington Univ.) – “‘Country Roads, Take Me Home / To the Place I Belong’: Finding Home on a Burning Planet for East Indians and Bangladeshi Immigrants in Italy”
- Rohit Chakraborty (Emory Univ.) – “Hindoo Holiday: New York Public Library”
- Marc Dadigan (University of California, Davis) – “Listening to Lendada Nur (Ancient, All-Knowing Salmon): A Linguistic Indigenous History of the First Pacific Coast Salmon Hatchery”
- Shaibal Dev Roy (Univ. of Southern California) – “Anticolonial Readership and Affinity between the Nineteenth-Century US and India”
- Natalie El-Eid (Syracuse Univ.) – “Druze Afterlives: Between Bodies and Borders”
- Marisol Fila (Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor) – “Content and Form: The Black Press and Articulations of Blackness in Twenty-First- Century Buenos Aires and São Paulo”
- Aned Ladino (Georgetown University) – “Afro-Andean and Diasporic Oral Feminisms: Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador”
- Maria Litvan (The Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York) – “Ciro Rodriguez and the Clan Choñik: On the Presence of Absence”
- Bria Paige (Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick) – “The (Im)Possibility: Exploring Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose and the Critical-Creative Method of Invention”
- Haider Shahbaz (Univ. of California, Los Angeles) – “Anticolonial Relation: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Urdu Magazines, 1930–1990”
- Benjamin Williams (Carnegie Mellon Univ.) – “Mediating Documentation: Race, Affective Governance, and the US-Mexico Border”
- Amal Zaman (Fordham Univ.) – “Minor Figures: South Asian Femininities as Global Form”
The Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship is supported by a fund established by Edward and Mireille Guiliano. The Global Fellowship is designed to encourage graduate students in languages, literatures, and related fields to pursue transformative experiences by exploring research and learning opportunities beyond their immediate community. “We established this fellowship to help eliminate some one of the barriers that prevents students from undertaking the research they are passionate about and to give them formative experiences that expand their world view,” said Edward Guiliano. “We want to encourage our fellows to have the confidence to step outside their comfort zones.”
