Three doctoral students in Weinberg have been awarded the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2021-2022. The recipients of this prestigious award are Ashley Dennis, Andrea Rosengarten, and Azadeh Safaeian.
This fellowship supports a year of research and writing to help advanced graduate students in the humanities and related social sciences in the last year of PhD dissertation writing. It encourages timely completion of the PhD and is open to scholars pursuing humanistic research on topics grounded in any time period, world region, or methodology.
Dennis, Rosengarten, and Safaeian will join the cohort of 65 students awarded this prestigious fellowship. They will receive up to $43,000 to put toward research costs, university fees, and other costs during the year. Including this year’s class of recipients, Northwestern has had twenty-four winners of this award.
Ashley Dennis, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of African American Studies, is researching how and why Black women educators promoted Black history and culture to children during the mid-twentieth century. Dennis’ dissertation examines teachers, librarians, and authors who challenged stereotypes in texts for children and supplemented or replaced them with antiracist writings of their own.
Andrea Rosengarten, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History, is researching twenty months of archival and oral history research in Namibia, South Africa, Germany, and England from 2018-2020. Rosengarten’s dissertation is tentatively titled “Remapping Namaqualand: Negotiating Ethnicity and Territoriality in a Southern African Borderland, 18th–21st Centuries.” Additionally, this fall, Andrea will be a graduate fellow in residence at Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous research. She hopes to bring a Namibian and South African studies perspective on land dispossession and apartheid to the Northwestern community.
Azadeh Safaeian, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies Program, will work on her dissertation, “Toward a Minor Theory of Trauma: Literature and Cinema of the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-Present.” Safaeian’s project examines a selection of multiethnic war memoirs, novels, and films and argues that the local and marginalized networks of knowledge and care simultaneously critique the western-oriented theories of disability/trauma and the ideological erasure of trauma in the context of the Iran-Iraq war.