Dissertation Fellows Program

Announcing Two Dissertation Fellowships:
Deadline is Monday, April 16, 2012

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Dean of the Graduate School and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowships at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT).

These two fellowships support the dissertation research of doctoral students working in the humanities and the arts within the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Each fellowship offers a stipend of $1,350 per month for 9–12 months. Each fellow will receive an additional $900 upon presenting their research at a conference, and for submitting a final report to Graduate School of Arts and Sciences on the research completed during their fellowship. The maximum award will be $18,000.

Graduate Fellows

Erin Kappeler is a PhD candidate in English at Tufts. Her dissertation, entitled “Shaping Free Verse: American Prosody and Poetics from 1880-1915,”rethinks common assumptions about free verse poetry. According to most literary histories, late nineteenth-century American poetry was hopelessly conventional and bound by metrical tradition. Where modernist critics have argued that free verse was an inevitable and necessary revolution in prosodical practices, she argues that what has seemed like a radical break was in fact a gradual shift, underwritten by a variety of ideological commitments (academic, national, and racial, among others). By creating a fuller, more nuanced account of American literary history, this study enables us to question critical investments in prosody and in modes of reading that have come to seem inevitable. Erin’s research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, prosody, and historical poetics.

Catherine (Katya) Vrtis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts University. Her dissertation, “Black, White, and Red: The Radical Drama of Langston Hughes,” considers the writer’s plays from his first, Mulatto, to the last written before World War II, the six short plays in the Limitations of Life set. She is interested in the history of radical thought in America, the form and function of propaganda, Russian drama, and the early 20th century artistic avant garde. In 2010 she received the Tufts Graduate School Summer Initiative for Doctoral Studies in the Humanities fellowship to support her dissertation research.