Footnotes: The Department Newsletter

Volume 52 |March 3, 2008| Number 22

FROM THE GRADUATE STUDIES OFFICE 

Student Fellowships for 2008-09
Instructions for applying for 2008-09 fellowships were emailed on Friday, January 18.  If you would like a paper copy of these instructions please see Stephanie Shockey.  Applications are due in 210 EB on March 7, 2008.

Fellowship Payment
Graduate students on fellowship for the Spring semester (1/16/08-5/15/08), will receive their first fellowship payment on 2/16/08 and their last payment on 5/16/08.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

Spring 2008 – Dates to Remember
March 10: Second half-session courses begin
March 15-23: Spring Break
March 14: Instruction resumes
April 4: Last day to add a second half-session course
April 4: Last day to add name to May degree list
April 11: Last day to withdraw from a current term without a grade of W
April 11: Last day to elect/change credit/no-credit option for a semester course
April 11: Last day for student to drop a semester course without a grade of W (without
approval)
April 11: Last day to take final exam for May doctoral degree
April 25: Last day to elect/change credit/no-credit option for a second half-session course
April 25: Last day to drop a second half-session course
April 25: Last day to deposit May master’s theses
April 30: Last day of instruction
May 1: Reading Day
May 1: Last day to add or drop a semester course with approval (a W is recorded)
May 1: Last day to remove an I grade from fall 2007 to prevent F by rule
May 2-9: Final examination period
May 2 : Last day to deposit May doctoral dissertations
May 11: May degree conferral (Commencement)

 

FELLOWSHIP AWARDS ANNOUNCED

Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Announces Fellowship Awards for 2008-09
The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities has awarded its annual Faculty and Graduate Student Fellowships to six faculty members and eight graduate students from the UI campus for the academic year 2008-09. The theme for the year is “Disciplinarity,” and the newly-selected Fellows will spend the year engaged in research on projects which will consider the term in all its varied meanings. The Fellows will participate in the year-long Fellows’ Seminar, and will present their research at the IPRH annual conference in late spring 2009.

The IPRH Faculty Fellows for 2008-09, and their research projects, will be: Jodi Byrd (American Indian Studies/English), Colonial Cacophonies, Postcolonial Worlds: American Indian Studies and the Frontiers of Discipline;, Melissa Littlefield (Kinesiology and Community Health/English), Disciplining Forensics: A Textbook Rhetoric of Literary Boundaries; Feisal G. Mohamed (English), Historicism, Formalism, and How Practitioners of English Read Milton; Sarah Projansky (Gender and Women’s Studies/Cinema Studies), Feminist Girls’ Studies as Emerging Discipline; Gabriel Solis (Musicology), Performing Genre and the Self: Tom Waits, Masculinity, Americana, and Rock at the end of “The American Century”; and Sharra Vostral (Gender and Women’s Studies/History), Producing an Epidemic: Rely Tampons, Toxic Shock Syndrome, and Conflicting Disciplinary Expertise.

 The IPRH Graduate Student Fellows for 2008-09, and the projects they will undertake, will be: Patrick W. Berry (English, Writing Studies), Making Teachers, Making Literacy: Negotiating the Rhetoric of Crisis and Myth; Anne Brubaker (English), Literature in the Age of Mathematics: Science, Gender, and the Multiplicity of Modernity; Peter Craft – Nicholson-IPRH Fellow (English), Warfare, Trade, and “Indians” in English Literature, 1652-1719; Kevin Healey (Institute of Communications Research),
The Spirit of Networks: New Media and the Changing Role of Religion in American Public Life; Luis Eduardo Herrera (Ethnomusicology), Politics of Creation/Creation of Politics: Music Making, Political Repression, and Cold War Strategies in Dictatorial Argentina; Jeff Kyong-McClain – Nicholson-IPRH Fellow (History),
Excavating the Nation: The Discipline of Archaeology and Control of the Past in Republican Southwest China; Rebecca Nickerson ( East Asian Languages and Cultures), Shaping the Body Domestic: Gender, Race, and Physical Culture in Imperial Japan; and Sarah L. Rasmusson(Institute of Communications Research), Whiteness, Girls’ Studies, and White Women as Girls from A-List Girls to Ziegfeld Girls.

In past years, the IPRH has typically awarded six graduate student fellowships, but beginning in the 2007-2008 academic year has increased the number of fellowships to eight, with the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) and the Nicholson Endowment Fund. Two of the graduate fellowship recipients – Peter Craft and Jeffrey Kyong-McClain – have been designated as Nicholson-IPRH Fellows for 2008-2009. The Nicholson Endowment is a gift of Grace W. Nicholson (1906-1998), who pursued undergraduate studies in LAS, and Professor Emeritus John A. Nicholson (1891-1986), a faculty member in the Philosophy Department at UIUC for 33 years. The Nicholson Endowment, which was established in 1999, provides support for the academic programs LAS and excellence in the study of the humanities on campus.

The annual theme of “Disciplinarity” will allow the Fellows to consider the ways in which, during the past two decades, traditional boundaries in the humanities and arts have been challenged and often dissolved. Important new formations - from fields like cultural studies to genres like multi-media installation - were the result. And yet, there is a widespread sense that disciplinarity still matters. Institutionally, it continues to govern graduate education as well as hiring and promotion. Intellectually, too, it very much holds sway. Not only are there few humanists and artists willing to discard the methods and approaches developed in their fields, but many of them anchor their scholarly and artistic practice in a critical engagement with disciplinary pasts. The result is an active moment for the rethinking of disciplinarity.

The IPRH’s choice of disciplinarity as the annual theme for 2008-09 reflects the program’s commitment to the ongoing investigation of the conditions of humanistic scholarship and artistic production. It also dovetails with the campus’s engagement with questions of disciplinarity. That engagement ranges from the infrastructural expansion of knowledge production and the promotion of innovative research to the active rethinking of institutional organization and the trajectories of academic careers.

Faculty Fellows are released from one semester of teaching, with the approval of their departments and colleges. They are also asked to teach one course, during the award year or the year immediately following, on a subject related to their Fellowship. Graduate Student Fellows receive a stipend and a tuition and fee waiver from the IPRH. All IPRH Fellows are expected to remain in residence on the UI campus during the award year, and to participate in the Program’s annual conference and related activities, including a year-long interdisciplinary Fellows’ Seminar.

More information about the IPRH Fellowship Programs can be found here, or by contacting IPRH Interim Director Christine Catanzarite at catanzar@uiuc.edu.

 

ESSAY CONTEST

The Sir John M. Templeton Fellowships Essay Contest
More than $20,000 will be awarded to college students and untenured junior faculty members for the best essays submitted in 2008 to the foundation. The essays should address the following questions:

Are property rights human rights?

How are property rights and human rights related? What are the similarities and differences?

If property rights are human rights, why have they enjoyed fewer legal protections and intellectual champions than other human rights?

These and other related questions should be explored in the 2008 essay contest. This annual contest is sponsored by the John M. Templeton Foundation and the Independent Institute. To learn more, please use the following link: http://www.independent.org/students/essay/

Deadline is May 1, 2008