The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities promotes expansive, interdisciplinary discussion and debate. The Institute cultivates ideas that transform into cutting-edge research and dynamic courses. Each year the Institute invites students in The Graduate School to apply for the Franke Graduate Fellowship. This fellowship, supported by generous funding from Richard and Barbara Franke and The Graduate School (TGS), brings together four outstanding doctoral students in the humanities to cultivate their research and teaching in the interdisciplinary setting of the Kaplan Institute. Franke Graduate Fellows devote two quarters, full time, to shaping their projects during fall and winter. They also receive pedagogical mentoring in developing an undergraduate course that they teach in their home departments in the spring.
This year the Institute has selected Lucien Ferguson, Risa Puleo, Chelsea Taylor, and Anna Zalokostas to join the 2021-2022 cohort.
Lucien Ferguson, from the Department of Political Science and Center for Legal Studies, will work on his dissertation titled The Spirit of Caste: Recasting the History of Civil Rights.
“My dissertation examines how caste discourse shaped the development of civil rights law and politics in the U.S. during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I argue that Black and abolitionist activists used caste language to critique forms of racial subjugation, to imagine solidaristic, post-caste futures, and to theorize novel legal and political strategies for their realization.”
Risa Puelo, from the Department of Art History, will work on her project titled Unsettling the Museum.
“Unsettling the Museum traces the transition of Native American objects from artifacts in anthropology, ethnography, and natural history museums into primitive art presented in modern art contexts to Non-Western art alongside objects from Africa and Oceania in the United States throughout the 20th century. Disentangling these objects from their museological frameworks reveals a liveliness that the term ‘object’ cannot account for.”
Chelsea Taylor, working to achieve her PhD in Theatre & Drama, will work on a research project titled Bringing the Bible to Life: Biblical Simulacra in the United States of America During the Twenty-first Century.
“My research tracks how three narratives—the story of Noah’s Ark, the Passion of the Christ, and the narrativization of the Bible’s production and circulation—are adapted using theatrical apparatuses at popular Christian tourist destinations. My work theorizes how theatricality functions as an immersive preaching technique which conflates religious and political beliefs for contemporary American Christians. I critique how these sites imply white, heteronormative, patriarchal societal structures are willed by God and underpin America’s morality.”
Anna Zalokostas, from the Department of English, will work on her dissertation titled Writing Home Economics: Globalization, Household Labor, and Racial Form.
“My dissertation provides a historicist account of multiethnic U.S. literature in the 1990s, arguing that a cohort of writers including Harryette Mullen, Karen Tei Yamashita, Myung Mi Kim, Junot Díaz, and Edwidge Danticat were significant commentators on the emergent discourses of post-Cold War economic globalization, with particular emphasis on the racialized and gendered economy of household labor.”