The MLA today announced it is awarding the association’s Edward Guiliano Global Fellowships to seventeen PhD students and candidates in MLA-related disciplines. The fellowships provide up to $2,000 to 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 experiential-learning experiences for humanities PhDs interested in careers outside academia. “We are thrilled to support another group of humanities graduate students as they conduct pioneering research,” said Paula M. Krebs, the executive director of the MLA. “Thanks to the contributions of Edward and Mireille Guiliano, the MLA has been able to bolster its commitment to the professional development of its members pursuing a variety of career paths. These projects are a testament to the wide range of scholarly disciplines and professional pathways that the humanities encompass.”
The recipients of the Edward Guiliano Global Fellowships will be honored on 10 January 2025, during the MLA Annual Convention, to be held in New Orleans. The selection committee members were Frederick Luis Aldama (Univ. of Texas, Austin), Catherine Baumann (Univ. of Chicago), Logan Connors (Univ. of Miami), Evgeny Dengub (Univ. of Southern California, Dornsife), Erin Edgington (Univ. of Nevada, Reno), Chris Forster (Syracuse Univ.), Jaime Harker (Univ. of Mississippi, Oxford), Davy Knittle (Univ. of Delaware), Kelley Kreitz (Pace Univ.), Danielle O. Pyun (Ohio State Univ., Columbus), Sarah Salter (Emory Coll.), Lara Vetter (Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte), Melanie Micir (Washington Univ. in St. Louis), and Amy Woodbury Tease (Norwich Univ.).
The recipients of the Edward Guiliano Global Fellowships and their project titles are:
- Preeshita Biswas (Texas Christian Univ.) – “trans-imperial intimacies: encounters, materialities, wakes”
- Christopher Catanese (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) – “Georgic Ecology in the Age of Improvement”
- Sayantika Chakraborty (Univ. of Florida, Gainesville) – “Displacement and Emplacement: Precarious Waterscape, Anthropogenic Toxins, and Female Climate Refugees in India’s Sundarbans”
- Eduardo Febres (Univ. of Notre Dame) – “Fostering Inclusive Digital Preservation: Advancing MOREL at Yale’s DH Lab”
- Inês Forjaz de Lacerda (Yale Univ.) – “Archiving Shadows: Women’s Literature and the Portuguese Legacy in Mumbai”
- Allison Gibeily (Northwestern Univ.) – “Between Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Arabic Travel Literature, Embodiment, and the Global Eighteenth Century”
- Rachel Kaufman (Univ. of California, Los Angeles) – “Quería Enseñar: Conversa Transmission, Memory, and Adaptation in Mexico and New Mexico”
- Eason Lu (Columbia Univ.) – “Gendered and Endangered Nüshu: An Inquiry of China’s Women-Only Script”
- Saraswati Majumdar (Univ. of Texas, Austin) – “Longing for Form: Indian Anglophone Poetry as Improvisational”
- Sharmeen Mehri (Univ. at Buffalo, State University of New York) – “Roshni Rustomji-Kerns: Diasporic Entanglements and Parsi Women Writers”
- Cynthia Meléndez (New York Univ.) – “Ungovernable Memories: Intimacy in the Trans Living Archives”
- Elizabeth Abena Osei (Univ. of Maryland, College Park) – “Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro: Mapping out Afrofuturist Worlds through Interactive Web Game Design”
- Kate Ostrom (Wayne State Univ.) – “‘The Desert Clings to Us’: Plants and Animals in the US-Mexico Borderscape”
- Christina Thomas (Univ. of California, Davis) – “Weaving Trans-Indigenous Language and Arts Connections to (Re)awaken Numu Yadooana (Northern Paiute language) for Generations to Come”
- Zaina Ujayli (Univ. of Southern California) – “Syrian Daughters and South Asian Allies: Intellectual Crossroads in 1920s New York”
- Trent Wintermeier (Univ. of Texas, Austin) – “Rhetorical Wastelands: Multimodality and Sonic Responsibilities in the Trans-Pecos”
- Jaclyn Zhou (Univ. of California, Berkeley) – “World Building: Performing Place, Race, and Nation in Anime Fan Tourism”
About Edward and Mireille Guiliano
Edward Guiliano received his bachelor’s degree from Brown University and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Stony Brook University. He joined the faculty at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in 1974 as an English instructor prior to finishing his PhD. In 2000, he became president of NYIT and served until early 2017. Mireille Guiliano completed her bachelor’s degree at Sorbonne Nouvelle and holds the French equivalent of a master’s degree in English and German. She is the author of the international best seller French Women Don’t Get Fat, among other writings, and has held leadership roles with LVMH along with other business endeavors.