Graduate Research Awards

The Willson Center Graduate Research Award provides support toward research‐related expenses for arts and humanities projects that are essential components of a graduate degree program. Application is open to any humanities and arts graduate student registered for an advanced degree.

For further details and application guidelines, please see Graduate Research Award under Fellowships and Grants.

Spring 2023

Jared Asser

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Scott Reynolds Nelson Project Description: A Reconstruction of Feeling: How Emotions Shaped the Post-Civil War Era

Bryant Barnes

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Scott Reynolds Nelson Project Description: Bonded by Debt: Interracial Politics, Railroads, and Capitalism in the Gilded Age South

Erin Bolivar

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Dana Bultman Project Description: The Virgin Mary in Spanish and Italian Painting and Poetry from the Early Modern to the Modern Era

Alexander Bowen

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Scott Reynolds Nelson Project Description: “They Will Not Do Justice to the Freedman”: The Lost Cause and Racial Violence in Florida, 1850-1942

Xavier Brown

MFA Candidate, Film, Television and Digital Media Major Professor: Shandra McDonald Project Description: Confine

Jeremy Diamond

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Demitra Thomloudis Project Description: An Inheritance in Two Parts

Lauren Elyamen

MA Candidate, History Major Professor: Cassia Roth Project Description: Summer Travels to Chile

Mark Gibb

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Mihm Project Description: Brewery Consolidation in the Gilded Age

Amit Kaushik

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: J. Peter Brosius Project Description: Social and Ecological Inequalities in More-than-Human-Geographies in Central India

Seaira Lett

PhD Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: Keith Langston Project Description: Documentation of Chuj Grammar

Grace Moorman

MA Candidate, Art History Major Professor: Mark Abbe Project Description: Recontextualizing a Remarkable Greek Polychrome Mosaic from the Egyptian Delta

Margaret Neel

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Akela Reason Project Description: Panning the Archive, Mining the Repertoire: Midcentury Gold Panning Tourism in Colorado

Katherine Rutter

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Jon Swindler Project Description: The Ogeechee “Blackwater” River, Among Other Bodies

Asif Sandeelo

PhD Candidate, Anthropology and ICON Major Professor: Laura German Project Description: Multi-Species Diplomacy: Elite Falconry, Politics of Conservation and Local Identities

Jasmine Underwood

MA Candidate, Sociology Major Professor: Patricia Richards Project Description: Returning the Gaze: Understanding the Persistence of Child Marriage in the Global North

Chelsea Wilson

MFA Candidate, Film, Television, and Digital Media Major Professor: Leandro Tadashi Duarte Project Description: Documentary Film Project with the Integrative Conservation Program and EBIC

Fall 2022

Anand Saurabh

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Rebecca Hallman Martini Project Description: Learning Writing Center Approaches From Global South Contemporaries

Raul Basilio

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Donald R. Nelson Project Description: Visceral Waters: Emotional Reactions to Water Contamination in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Mickey Boyd

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: James Enos Project DescriptionEnvironment of Isolation

Christian Choe

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Mihm Project Description: The “After” Lives of U.S. Administrators: Goethals and Gorgas after the Panama Canal

Mary Grey

MFA Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: David Saltz Project Description: Mission STEAM: Designing Multi-media Performances for Immersive Learning

Lynn Jones

MHP Candidate, College of Environment and Design Major Professor: Scott Nesbit Project Description: The African American Cemetery: Preserving a Vanishing Cultural Heritage in Georgia (Case Study)

Brandon LaReau

PhD Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: Emily Sahakian Project Description: New Approaches to Race Onstage: Opera and Musical Theatre and/as Intercultural Performance

Joshua McNeill

PhD Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: Jon Forrest Project Description: The Expression of Race in Louisiana French Subject Pronouns among Creoles and Cajuns

Jason Rafferty

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Margaret Morrison Project Description: Possible Landscapes – Pictorial Narratives of the Sustainability Transition

Caitlin Samples

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Timothy Gupton Project Description: The Acquisition of the Uses and Meanings of Possessive Structures in Second and Heritage Languages

Eliot Westdorp

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Chad Howe Project Description: A Loss of Full Seseo: An Apparent Time Study of Galician Fricatives

Di Wilms

MFA Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: George Contini Project Description: Consolidated Collaborative Feature Film Project

Christina Wood

PhD Candidate, Historic Preservation Major Professor: Magdalena Zurawski Project Description: In Situ Research for Creative Writing Dissertation

Spring 2022

Gehad Abdelal

PhD Candidate, Philosophy Major Professor: Christine Cuomo Project DescriptionIslamization of Facebook

Zachary Anderson

PhD Candidate, Creative Writing Major Professor: Andrew Zawacki Project Description“Entering the Valley of Dreams”: View-Master, Souvenir, Imperial Kitsch

Connor Austell

DMA Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: David Fung Project DescriptionDiscovering Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins the Composer – Recording Project + Research Document

Rose Brock

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Mo Costello Project Description“Soliloquy” Thesis Installation

Melissa DePierro

MA Candidate, Art History Major Professor: Asen Kirin Project DescriptionInterpreting the Mosaics of The Villa of Piazza Armerina

Savannah Downing

PhD Candidate, Communication Studies Major Professor: Belinda Stillion Southard Project DescriptionRadium’s Rhetorical Force: Labor, Environment, and Gender in Ottawa, Illinois

Alejandra González-Calvo

MA Candidate, Art History Major Professor: Mark Abbe Project DescriptionThe Vatican Runner: A Unique Depiction of Female Athleticism

Alexandra Greco

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Mihm Project DescriptionMarconi, the State, and the Struggle between Private and Public Interest

Isys Hennigar

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Ted Saupe Project DescriptionLike Milk from a Stone

Lindsey Kennedy and Katie Ford

MFA Candidates, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Jon Swindler Project Description: Twin Realms

Alaine Lambertson

MA Candidate, Art History Major Professor: Nell Andrew Project DescriptionManifestations of German Expressionism in Dance in the 1920s and 1930s

Anne McInnis

PhD Candidate, Textiles, Merchandising & Interiors Major Professor: Katalin Medvedev Project Description: Felt as Other

Elise Nation

MFA Candidate, Entertainment and Media Studies Major Professor: Sanghoon Lee Project Description: Poppy

Sarah Owen

MHP Candidate, Historic Preservation Major Professor: Wayde Brown Project Description: Storied Pasts: Reinterpreting Andalusia Farm: Home of Flannery O’Connor

Kelvin Summerhill

MFA Candidate, Film, Television and Digital Media Major Professor: Neil Landau Project DescriptionBlack Butterfly: A Cinematic Exploration of Black Male Trauma

Jason Woodworth-Hou

PhD Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: David Saltz Project DescriptionBefore the Hedges: Experiencing UGA History through Augmented Reality

Fall 2021

Alina Ahmed

MA Candidate, Philosophy Major Professor: Christine Cuomo Project Description: National American Association for Philosophy and Education Conference Presentation: Voluntourism and Epistemic Injustice: How Educational Institutions Benefit Credibility Excess

Zahria Renee Cook

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Benjamin Britton Project Description: Navigating through Blackness with Painting and Sound

Sha’Mira Covington

PhD Candidate, Textiles, Merchandising, and Interiors Major Professor: Katalin Medvedev Project Description: The Revolution will be Embodied

Bokyoung Jo

PhD Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Christina Hanawalt Project Description: Envisioning Paradigm Shift in Art Education: Provoking Homebody as a New Norm in Pandemic

Terrell Orr

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Cindy Hahamovitch Project Description: The Roots of Global Citrus in Florida and São Paulo

Josué Piñeiro

PhD Candidate, Philosophy Major Professor: Christine Cuomo Project Description: National American Association for Philosophy and Education conference presentation: Colorblindness, Hermeneutical Marginalization and Hermeneutical Injustice

Annie Simpson

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: James Enos Project Description: The end of a movement you have not yet made

Bryan Wysocki

DMA Candidate, Music Major Professor: Peter van Zandt Lane Project Description: USB to DMX for Interactive Lighting in Music Composition

Spring 2021

Justine Olaitan Aremu

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Melissa Harshman Project Description: The Ubiquity of the Lost Identity

Kit Callaway

PhD Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: Chad Howe Project Description: Gender-Neutral Pronouns in Use: a comparative study of genderqueer pronoun application

Zaira Castillo-Ramos

MM Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Liza Stepanova Project Description: Identity through Sound

Kelly Catlin

DMA Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Angela Jones-Reus Project Description: Backstory: An Album of Innovative Electroacoustic Flute Music

Ashely Crooks-Allen

PhD Candidate, Sociology Major Professor: Dr. Patricia Richards Project Description: Mestizaje Undone: A Qualitative Social Media Analysis of Afro-Latinx Identity & Social Movements

Kesha James

PhD Candidate, Communication Studies Major Professor: Roger Stahl Project Description: Redressing Whiteness in America through Black Popular Culture

Katharine Miele

MFA Candidate Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Ben Briton Project Description: Throw Blanket

Volha Murashka

PhD Candidate, Department of Communication Studies Major Professor: Jiaying Liu Project Description: Understanding How Features of Fitspiration Posts Contribute to Body Image and Exercise Intentions

Amber Pitt

PhD Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Dr. Lynn Sanders-Bustle Project Description: Everyone’s Invited: Community and Care in Relation with Arts Education

Benjamin Rutherfurd

PhD Candidate, English, co-recipient Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Major Professor: Ed Pavlic Project Description: Living with Wildfire: Oral Histories of Northern California

Sarah Shermyen

PhD Candidate, English, co-recipient Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Major Professor: Cody Marrs Project Description: The Orange and the Palm: Writing Florida into the American Dream

Kelsey Wishik

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Martijn van Wagtendonk Project Description: Thesis Show Material Support

Fall 2020

Shaunia Lynn Grant

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Demitra Thomloudis Project Description: Subversion of Medicine through Dissemination of Wearable Art

Jingxian Li

PhD Candidate, College of Environment and Design Major Professor: Eric A. MacDonald Project Description: Overtourism and Authenticity in World Heritage Site — the Case of Suzhou Classical Gardens

Alexander Morales

PhD Candidate, Communication Studies Major Professor: Thomas Lessl Project Description: Archival Study of the Mont Pelerin Society at the Hoover Institute

Zachary Perdieu

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: John Wharton Lowe Project Description: Pilgrim Shadow: Pursuing Utopia in the Fictional American Small Town

Ciel Rodriguez

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Eileen Wallace Project Description: Exploring the Act of Remembering Through Handmade Paper

Shannon Rodriguez

PhD Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: Lewis C. (Chad) Howe Project Description: Latino English in Georgia: A Sociophonetic Study of the Latino Southerner’s Identity

Nathan Rothenbaum

PhD Candidate, Communication Studies, Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner Major Professor: Celeste Condit Project Description: Investigating the Rhetoric of Higher Orders in the Court Martial of William Calley Jr.

Rachel Seburn

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Mark Callahan Project Description: A Momentary Visceral Sound Experience: During a Global Pandemic

Atalanta Siegel

MFA Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: George Contini Project DescriptionImmersive Digital Theatre: Creating Connection Between Actor and Audience in a Virtual Performance

Spring 2020

Cristhian Alfonso

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Nicolas Lucero Project Description: Fictions of Nazism in 21st Century Colombian Literature: Global Ideologies and Literary Markets

Mac Balentine

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Benjamin Britton Project DescriptionMFA Student Exhibition Materials Funding

Nathan Dixon

PhD Candidate, English and Creative Writing Major Professor: LeAnne Howe Project DescriptionDe Soto, Un-Redacted as Told by the Lady of Cofitachequi

Jordan Dopp

PhD Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner Major Professor: Mark Abbe Project DescriptionThe “Petra, Jordan Garden and Pool Project” Archaeological Dig and Field Research

Fernan Gomez-Monedero

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Elizabeth Wright Project Description: License to Steal: Dialogues on the Spoils of War in Don Quixote

Alexandra Hofner

PhD Candidate, Integrative Conservation and Anthropology Major Professor: Roberta Salmi Project DescriptionRe-articulating Pathways to Human-Wildlife Coexistence in Sri Lanka’s North Central Dry Zone

Mary Helen Hoque

PhD Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Susan Thomas, Naomi Graber (Faculty Advisor) Project DescriptionBarbers, Belles, & the Ties that Bind: Music, Citizenship, & Class in the American South, 1865-1895

Jacqueline Kari

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Jed Rasula Project DescriptionThe Annotated Songs: A Digital Guide to Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes”

Ronika McClain

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Marni Shindelman Project DescriptionONE LGBT Archives Research Trip

Thomas McShea

MA Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Berry Project DescriptionThe Cromwell Brothers: Two New York Quakers and the Civil War

Vanessa Raditz

PhD Candidate, Geography Major Professor: Amy Trauger Project DescriptionFire & Flood Film: Visualizing Queer and Trans Climate Resilience Solutions

 

Fall 2019

Philip Brankin

MFA Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: David Zucker Saltz Project Description: Project Mapping Workshop

Caitlin Adair Daglis

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Demi Thomloudis Project DescriptionSocial Fabric: Exploring Cultural Narratives Through Sewn Language and Object

Laurel Nicole Fulton

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Demi Thomloudis Project DescriptionThesis Funding 2019

Mary Christine Gordon

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Melissa Harshman Project Description: Shaped by Play – Thesis Project Materials and Travel

Louisiana Lightsey

PhD Candidate, Anthropology. Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner Major Professor: J. Peter Brosius Project DescriptionIndigenous Cosmology and Climate Activism in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Hannah Rose Mayo

MHP Candidate, College of Environmental Design Major Professor: Wayde Brown Project Description: Who Tells Your Story: An Analysis of Historic Site Interactions with Artistic Cultural References

Leah Diane Mazza

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Demi Thomloudis Project DescriptionCryptic Encounters

Alexandra Burger McClay

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Eileen Wallace Project Description: Shifting Encounters Through Multi-Media Art Installations

 

          

Spring 2019

Tracy Barnett

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Berry Project Description: Armed, Drunk, and Dangerous: White Paramilitary Violence in the Civil War Era South, 1840-1877

Shelley Biesel

PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Major Professor: Don Nelson Project Description: Historicizing the Biofuel Boom: Gendered Identities and Plantation Agriculture in Northeast Brazil

Amy Bonnaffons

PhD Candidate, English Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner Major Professor: Reginald McKnight Project DescriptionThe Perimeter of Eden

Badie Khaleghian

MM Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Peter Lane Project Description: Premiering New Music at Alba Music

Ginger Ko

PhD Candidate, Enlgish Major Professor: Magdalena Zurawski Project Description: Sound and Light Ecology – Listening to Poetry in the Natural World  

Megan Neely

PhD Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Shelley Zuraw Project Description: Titian as Ovid: Afterlife of the Metamorphoses 

Samantha Regal

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Susan Rosenbaum Project Description: Solving Feeling: Modernist Middlebrowisms, Art, Affect, and Queering Detective Fiction

Leticia Rincon Herce

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Sarah Blackwell Project Description: A Study on how Rape Myths Shape the Courtroom Discourse in Puerto Rico

Elise Robinson

PhD Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: Marla Carlson Project Description: Research Trip to the Fales Library, Elizabeth Robins collection

Cydney Kate Seigerman

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Don Nelson Project Description: The Multiple Dimensions of Water in a Water Insecure Place           

Fall 2018

Emily Claire Duvall

MA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner Major Professor: Shelley Zuraw Project Description: Diana and the Hunt: Myth and Allegory in Early Modern French Courts

Anya M. Bonanno

PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Major Professor: Laura German Project Description: Gendered Property Relations and Displacement in Sierra Leone

Angela M. Alexander

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Berry Project DescriptionOld Age in the Old South: Senescent Women’s Health and Relationships, 1850-1870

Sarah Nowell

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Jennifer Birch Project Description: Ethnohistoric Analysis of Economy, and Materiality on the Canadian Plateau, British Columbia

Alexander Crosett

DMA Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Evgeny Rivkin Project Description: Osaka International Music Competition

Emma Catherine Perry

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Andrew Zawacki Project Description: Future Perfect: A Proposal for Research on the Edward A. Feigenbaum Archive at Stanford University

Rachel Alana Watson

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Mary Pearse Project Description: Cast Away in Life and Death

Paula Ruth Runyon

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Melissa Harshman Project Description: Weaving Connections – A Social Exploration of Craft as the Intersection of People, Nature, Politics        

Catherine Chang

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Ben Britton Project Description: Large Handmade Paper Deckle Box with Presence

Sarah Elizabeth Bigger

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Chad Howe Project Description: Borrowing Strategies from Quechua to Spanish in Cusco, Peru           

Ciyadh Irene Hill-Wells

DMA Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Daniel Bolshoy Project Description: Margins Guitar Collective                

Rachel Miller Olsen

PhD Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: Margaret E. L. Renwick Project Description: It’s all in how you say it: The Prosody of Emotion    

Michael Olsen

PhD Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: William Kretzschmar Project Description: Ideological discourse in American News Editorials                

Spring 2018

Bethany Bateman

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Chad Howe Project Description: Language Contact in the Andes: An Analysis of Past Temporal Reference in Cusco, Peru

Dimelza Broche

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner Major Professor: Stefanie S. Jackson Project Description: The Problem Body

Cristina Echezarreta

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Michael Marshall Project Description: Hive Mind Behavior at Georgia Prisons

Laura Foster

PhD Candidate, Anthropology & Integrative Conservation Major Professor: Laura German Project Description: Translating Indigenous Rights in Peru: Identity and Resistance around Peru’s Prior Consultation Law

Danielle Gilman

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Adam Parkes Project Description: The Critical Legacy of Rebecca West

Genevieve Guzman

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Reginald McKnight Project Description: Stricken: The Art & Illness of Tanaquil Le Clercq

Rebecca Jackson

PhD Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: David Saltz Project Description: Alternative Confederate Monuments      

Dot-Eum Kim

PhD Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: Chad Howe Project Description: Korean American English in the South: Language, culture, and the making of a new dialect         

Jennifer Niswonger

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Margaret Morrison Project Description: “We”: American Thanksgiving, Conflict, and Communion

Alexander Nordlund

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: John Morrow Project Description: ‘Please Remember Me Most Kindly’: British Letter-Writing and Memory of the First World War           

Christian Pettersen

PhD Candidate, Geography Major Professor: Amy Ross Project Description: Locating the International in Hybrid Justice               

Leanne Purdum

PhD Candidate, Geography Major Professor: Amy J. Ross Project Description: “Family Residential Center” or “Baby Jail”?    

Emily F. Ramsey

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Virginia Nazarea Project Description: Evolving Knowledge, Sustaining Memory: Latinx Immigrant Farmers’ Agricultural Practices in the U.S.      

Jessica Roberts

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Cynthia Camp Project Description: Devouring Patrilineal Society: A Consideration of Siggeir’s Mother

Ben Robichaux

DMA Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Peter Lane Project Description: The Alba Music Festival – Professional Development and Research            

Fall 2017

Derrick Joseph Angermeier

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: John H. Morrow, Jr. Project DescriptionLost Causes and Tragic Futures in Nazi Bavaria and the Jim Crow South

Carla Cao

MM Candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Peter Lane Project DescriptionKayaking Through Sound 

Katelyn Chapman

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Chris Hocking Project Description: Domestic, Light, & Cold

Ally Christmas      

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Marni Shindelman Project Description: The Extended Self(ie): How to Coexist with Yourself

Travis Jones

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Jennifer Birch Project Description: Life Among Early Plains Villagers within The Middle Missouri Trench: A New Chronology

Qianru Li   

PhD Candidate, Theatre & Film Studies Major Professor: David Saltz Project Description: Within These Walls: Conundrums of Establishing Self-Identification of Chinese Americans

Deepanjan Mukhopadhyay         

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Marni Shindelman Project Description: Battle Cry in a Soundproof Room    

Johanna Lynn Norry

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner Major Professor: Jennifer Crenshaw Project Description: Crime of Passion: The Drewry Project          

Lauren O’Connor-Korb

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Demitra Thomloudis Project Description: Rapid Prototyping and the role of the Public Sculpture

Pamela E. Rogers

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: PMichael Oliveri Project Description: Topolographies: What Makes a Body?       

Alexis Spina         

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Demi Thomloudis Project Description: Box Truck Gallery       

Joseph Abraham Stanley   

PhD Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: Chad Howe Project Description: Intra-Family Language Variation in Utah County, Utah 

Spring 2017

Berea Antaki

MS Candidate, Textiles, Merchandising, and Interiors, College of Family and Consumer Sciences  Major Professor: Katalin Medvedev Project DescriptionExamining the Values of Sustainable Fiber Cooperatives in Uruguay via Participatory Observation

Andrew Bonanno

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Bram Tucker Project DescriptionFamily Farm, Family Land: The history and dynamics of a collective family farm in Sierra Leone 

Katharine Dahlstrand

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: John Inscoe Project Description: Andrew Johnson’s Greeneville: A Community Study in Loyalty

Ellie Dent      

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Christopher Hocking Project Description: Souvenirs of Humiliation

Holly Gallagher

PhD Candidate, English Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner, Spring 2017 Major Professor: Tricia Lootens Project Description: Gender and Affect in 19th-Century Spaces of Art

Fakhrodin Kazemi   

MA Candidate, Religion Major Professor: Kenneth Honerkamp Project Description: The Zūrkhāna: Identities, Figures and Symbols

Philip Limerick         

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Chad Howe Project Description: Investigating Language Change in a Georgia Latino Community    

Johanna Montlouis-Gabriel

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Rachel Gabara Project Description: Reading Feminine Literary Narratives as History in the Francophone World          

John McGreevy

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Donald Nelson Project Description: Underlying Causes and Indicators of Vulnerability to Hurricanes: Lesson from Rural Haiti

Meltem Safak

PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature Major Professor: Peter O’Neill Project Description: The Traces of Catastrophe in the Twentieth Century Armenian and Turkish Literature       

Marcela Reales Visbal         

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Mark Anderson Project Description: The Porosity of the Border: Physical and Immaterial Negotiations in the Amazon Tri-Border Region        

Seth Wilson   

PhD Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: Marla Carlson Project Description: Warriors, Partners, Enthusiasts: Transnational Gender Performance in the Eighteenth Century  

Fall 2016

Madeline Critchfield

MA Candidate, Romance Languages Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner, Fall 2016 Major Professor: Margaret Lubbers Quesada Project Description: The Miskitu-Spanish Bilingual Community in Nicaragua

Alexandra Edwards

PhD Candidate, English Major Professors: Susan Rosenbaum Project Description: Making Jam in Marjorie’s Kitchen         

Holly Fling

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Tricia Lootens Project Description: The Matter of Time-Space in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing

Shuk Han Lui   

MFA Candidate, Drawing and Painting, Art Major Professor: Melissa Harshman Project Description: Artist books for Mozart’s Sonata K. 570 Adagio and Schubert’s Ständchen

Kendra Macomber

MA Candidate, Art History Major Professor: Alisa Luxenberg Project Description: Not a Picnic: The Issue of Class in Monet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe    

Katherine Miller

MFA Candidate, Art Major Professor: Jon Swindler Project Description: Minimalism and Spatial Encounter

Mary English Scales

MA Candidate, CED: Historic Preservation Major Professor: Eric MacDonald Project Description: Cultural Landscape Mgmt. in the Chattahoochee National Forest: A Case Study of Lake Winfield Scott        

Kaylynn Lee Washnock

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Akela Reason Project Description: Making Atlanta: Civil War Memory, Identity Politics and Tourism, 1958 – 1996

Shayi Zhang   

MFA Candidate, Theatre & Film Studies Major Professor: Mike Hussey Project Description: “Silent Dating”: An Short Animation with Pencil-drawn Characters in a 3D digital world

Spring 2016

Gina Abelkop

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Tricia Lootens Project Description: Feminist Recovery: Investigating the Archives of June Arnold   

Franziska Barbara Brunner

PhD Candidate, Music Major Professors: David Haas and Susan Thomas Project Description: Schoenberg’s Voices         

Megan Anne Conger

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Jennifer Birch Project Description: Household Economy and Market Participation Among the Petun, A.D. 1550-1650

Calvin Ferst   

MA Candidate, Linguistics Major Professor: Joshua Bousquette Project Description: Walhalla: Language Shift in the Garden of the Gods

Timothy Johnson

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Shane Hamilton Project Description: Growth Industry: Unearthing the Origins of Fertilizer-Fueled Agriculture in the United States         

Katherine Campbell Jones

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Stephen Kowalewski Project Description: Reconnaissance of the Steiner and McGlashan Archaeological Collections, Smithsonian Institution

Jieun Lee

PhD Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Research Award Winner Major Professor: Marla Carlson Project Description: Beyond Kinship: Performing Korean American Adoptee Theater         

Sarah Lowman

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Mark Anderson Project Description: Political Ecology and Cultural Activism in Nahua Literature of Mexico

Sarah Mayo

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Miriam Jacobson Project Description: Folger Library Dissertation Research Proposal         

Erin Elise McClenathan

PhD Candidate, Art History Major Professor: Nell Andrew Project Description: Handheld Cinema: Ephemerality and the Photographic Avant-Garde (1917-1944)

James A. Owen   

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Claudio Saunt Project Description: Singing the Holy Ghost: Theology, Hymnody, and Race in Three Moravian Communities, 1763-1838

Katherine Reinberger

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Laurie Reitsema Project Description: Bioarchaeological Perspectives on the Individual Lives Associated with the Battles of Himera, Sicily         

Alexander M. Stephens

MA Candidate, History Major Professor: Bethany Moreton Project Description: “I Hope They Don’t Come to Plains”: Race, ‘Undesirability,’ and the Mariel Boatlift

Fall 2015

Kathryn Paige Bove

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Pilar Chamorro Fernandez Project Description: Time reference in a tenseless language and neighboring languages       

Tyler Lee Ehrlich

MM Candidate, Music Major Professor: Cynthia Johnston Turner Project Description: Love, Marriage, and Death: An Interdisciplinary Recital         

Michael Scott Kennedy

MFA Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: John Kundert-Gibbs Project Description: Love Bites        

Charlotte Jean Maier   

MA Candidate, Art History Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award Winner Major Professor: Nell Andrew Project Description: Suzanne Duchamp’s Diversion from Man’s Machine Aesthetic

Sara Renee Marshall

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Andrew Zawacki Project Description: Agnès Varda: a Woman Moving in Pictures

Michael H. Taylor

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Peter Hoffer Project Description: A Founding Friendship:  James Wilson and James Iredell       

Gale Marie Thompson

PhD Candidate, Creative Writing Major Professor: Andrew Zawacki Project Description: Helen or My Hunger: Memory and Forgetting in Helen in Egypt

John Spence Townsend

MFA Candidate, Art, Painting and Drawing Major Professor: Benjamin Britton Project Description: Painting Soundtrack

Ellen Kimberly Waters

PhD Candidate, Linguistics / Romance Languages Major Professor: Margaret Renwick Project Description: Rebel time speech in the 21st century:  Five Gullah-Geechee dialects

Spring 2015

Patrick Brien

MFA Candidate, Art Major Professor: Christopher Hocking Project Description: The Digital Gaze

Dan Du

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Allan Kulikoff Project Description: This World in a Tea Cup: Sino-American Tea Trade in the Nineteenth Century

Charles Adron Farris III

PhD Candidate, Theatre & Film Studies Major Professor: Marla Carlson Project Description: The Final Archive

Shamala Gallagher

PhD Candidate, English Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award Winner Major Professor: Ed Palic, Susan Rosenbaum Project Description: The Danko Hoax

Jason Lee Guthrie

PhD Candidate, Journalism & Mass Communications Major Professor: Janice Hume Project Description: Science and Useful Arts: Inventors, Artisans, and American Copyright Law

Sarah Grace Harrell

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Susan Rosenbaum Project Description: Cosmopolitanism in the Lowcountry Lyric

Kira Hegeman

PhD Candidate, Art Major Professor: James Woglom Project Description: Interaction, Art and Conversation

Julia Hernández

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Dana Bultman Project Description: The Monstrous Other: Medieval Iconographic Precedents for “Monstrous” Amerindians

Courtney Hoffman

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Elizabeth Kraft Project Description: Pathetic Temporality in the Eighteenth-Century Women’s Epistolary Tradition

Tareva Johnson

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Valerie Babb Project Description: Transnationalism and African American Literature

Amie M. Jones

PhD Candidate, Journalism & Mass Communications Major Professor: Janice Hume Project Description: The Forgotten Children of Bath:  A Case Study Exploration of the Media’s Role in Public Memory

Leda Lozier

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Betina Kaplan Project Description: Gender, Violence, and Memory in Contemporary Central American Women’s Narrative

Thomas Luke Manget

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: John Inscoe Project Description: Ginseng on the Virginia Frontier

Jordan A. Rothacker

PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature Major Professor: Joel Black Project Description: Ai Weiwei Alcatraz Art Installation/William T. Vollmann Art Show and Interview

Amanda Sutton

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Jennifer Birch Project Description: Transforming and Performing Identity in Colonial Quebec, AD 1700-1900

James Wall

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Robert A. Pratt Project Description: National Archives Trip

Betty Jean Young

PhD Candidate, Theatre & Film Studies Major Professor: David Saltz Project Description: We Hold These Memories Inside a We

Fall 2014

Louisa Powell

MFA Candidate, Art Major Professor: Georgia Strange Project Description: Erosion

Nastassja Pugliese

PhD Candidate, Philosophy Major Professor: Edward Halper Project Description: From Image to Reason: Reconstructing Spinoza’s Theory of Imagination

Amanda Scheutzow

MFA Candidate, Art Major Professor: Mary Hallam Pearse Project Description: Portable Tintype Photograph Studio

Laura Lake Smith

PhD Candidate, Art Major Professor: Isabelle Loring Wallace Project Description: Imaging the In-between: The Art of Richard Tuttle

Andrew Fialka

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Berry Project Description: Of Methods and Madness: A Spatial History Approach to Guerrilla Violence in Civil War Missouri

Jun Suk Hyun

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: William Stueck Project Description: U.S.-ROK alliance after the Korean War

Jason Innman

MFA Candidate, Art Major Professor: Margaret Morrison Project Description: Phantasmagoria – MFA Thesis Exhibition

Colin James Law

MA Candidate, Religion Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award Winner Major Professor: Kenneth Honerkamp Project Description: How Narratives Have Protected Malerkotla

Tyler Leslie

MFA Candidate, Art Major Professor: Jon Swindler Project Description: A Succession of Discrete Moments – Kinetic Art Installation

Spring 2014

Alisha Cromwell

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Allan Kulikoff Project Description: The Purdah of the Southern Plantation

Jennifer Czuba

MFA Candidate, Theatre & Film Studies Major Professor: David Saltz Project Description: Light Cube One Act Fest

Emily Everhart

PhD Candidate, Art Major Professor: Alisa Luxenberg Project Description: Friendship in Philadelphia

Katherine Fialka

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Barry Project Description: Textual Healing: Female Readers, Self-Writing, and Sensibility in the American South, 1840-1920

Cristiane Lira

PhD Candidate, Romance Languages Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award Winner Major Professor: Susan Canty Quinlan Project Description: The Representation of Female Guerrillas: Challenging Discourses of Gender and Memory in Literature and Film in Brazil and Argentina through the dictatorships of the 1960’s and 1970’s

Robert Poister

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: John Inscoe Project Description: Smuggling Chaos: Black Market Mayhem and Confederate Defeat

Miriam Brown Spiers

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Channette Romero Project Description: The Sovereign Other: Encountering Difference in Native American Science Fiction

Kurt Windisch

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Claudio Saunt Project Description: The Battle of a Thousand Slain

Fall 2013

Dillon Carroll

PhD Candidate, History Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award Winner Major Professor: Stephen Berry Project Description: “The Living Souls, the Bodies Tragedies”: Mental Illness and the American Civil War

Michael Edgerton

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Jed Rasula Project Description: What Most Vividly (A Choral Work)

Jeffrey Fallis

PhD Candidate, English/Creative Writing Major Professor: Ed Pavlic Project Description: Hard Sand: an H.D. play

Michael Ford

PhD Candidate, English Major Professor: Susan Rosenbaum Project Description: The Epic and Catastrophe

Angela Hall

MFA Candidate, Theatre and Film Studies/Dramatic Media Major Professor: Michael Hussey Project Description: The Pregnant Tree (Stage Play)

Hong Hong

MFA Candidate, LDSOA/Drawing and Painting Major Professor: Margaret Morrison Project Description: Vessel, a fine art installation

Elizabeth Kleene

MFA Candidate, LDSOA Major Professor: Chris Hocking Project Description: “Artifice Destiny”– Visual Thesis Project

Jessica Machacek

MFA Candidate, LDSOA/Printmaking Major Professor: Melissa Harshman Project Description: IN OUT IN

Victoria Naden

MA Candidate, Art History Major Professor: Janice Simon Project Description: Theresa Bernstein’s Images of American Women in the City

Michael Paparone

PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature Major Professor: Thomas Cerbu Project Description: The Rhetoric of Cultural Patrimony

Katherine Rohrer

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: John C. Inscoe Project Description: The Religious Self-Definition and Expression of Elite White Women in the Nineteenth-Century South

Dan Rosenberg

PhD Candidate, English/Creative Writing Major Professor: Andrew Zawacki Project Description: Poetry Exchange Project

James Welborn III

PhD Candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Berry Project Description: Dueling Cultures: Southern Honor, Religion, and Manhood in the Civil War Era

Janelle Young

MFA Candidate, LDSOA/Photography Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award Honorable Mention Major Professor: Michael Marshall Project Description: Historical Wet-plate Collodion Research

Spring 2013

Jaime Bull

MFA candidate, Painting and Drawing Major Professor: Christopher Hocking Project Description: Lady Beasts: An investigation of womanliness 

Laura Davis

PhD candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Berry Project Description: A Brotherhood Adrift: Boat Burners, Naval Guerrillas, and the Brown Water Confederate Navy

Karla Nicole Evans

MA candidate, Religion Major Professor: Carolyn Medine Project Description: Feeling Muslim

Ximena Gonzalez-Parada

PhD candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Lorgia García-Peña Project Description: Afro-Ecuadorian Identity: a Re-examination of Foundational Narratives

Tifany Lee

MFA candidate, Theatre and Film Studies Major Professor: David Zucker Saltz Project Description: Trash: A Love Story

David Meek

PhD candidate, Anthropology Major Professor: Peter Brosius Project Description: Learning and Landscape Change in the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement

Youngmi Moon

DMA candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Major Professor: Martha Thomas, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Faculty Advisor: Lisa Fusillo, Dance Project Description: Research on accompaniment for ballet class

Kai Riedl

PhD candidate, Hugh Hodgson School of Music Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award Winner Major Professor: Jean Kidula Project Description: “Our New Silence” – Performance

Chantell Smith

PhD candidate, Department of Romance Languages Major Professor: Lesley Feracho Project Description: Diasporic Links: African-Americans and Afro-Cubans in Transnational Dialogue

Fall 2012

Rachel Debuque

MFA candidate, Sculpture Major Professor: Larry Millard Project Description: Home Front

Kylie Horney

PhD candidate, History Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award Winner Major Professor: Peter C. Hoffer Project DescriptionFrom Vigorous & Bold Operations

Matthew Hulbert

PhD candidate, History Major Professor: John Inscoe Project Description: Ghosts of the Guerrilla War: Civil War Memory in Missouri

Joshua Hussey

PhD candidate, English Major Professors: Andrew Zawacki, Jed Rasula, Doug Anderson Project Description: Travel to the Thomas J. Dodd Special Collections at the University of Connecticut

Gabriel Alexander Lovatt

PhD candidate, English Major Professor: Jed Rasula Project DescriptionFlaming Creatures: Oscar Wilde and the Legacy of American Decadence

Rachel Paparone

PhD candidate, Romance Languages Major Professor: Jonathan F. Krell Project Description: Understanding Self and Nature: reviving the “Bildungsroman” in the works of Jean-Christophe Rufin

Danielle Peters

MFA candidate, Printmaking Major Professor: Jon Swindler Project Description: Writhe

David Thomson

PhD candidate, History Major Professor: Stephen Berry Project Description: August Belmont and the Struggle for Fiscal Diplomacy

Spring 2012

Lisa Bolding

Ph.D. candidate, English Major Professor: Fran Teague

Ashley David

PhD candidate, English-Creative Dissertation Co-Major Professors: Edward Pavlic and Reginald McKnight Project Description: American (post)

Adam Forrester

MFA Candidate, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor: Michael Marshall Project Description: EAT WHITE DIRT (documentary film)

Christine Hellyer

PhD candidate, Art Education Major Professor: Tracie Costantino Project Description: Transmission of knowledge within a Hopi Indian jewelers

Sandy McCain

PhD Candidate in Art, Art History, Lamar Dodd School of Art Major Professor:  Janice Simon Project Description: Dissertation research in Charleston, SC

La Shonda Mims

PhD Candidate, Department of History Major Professor: James C. Cobb Project Description: Research at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, NY

Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment

PhD candidate, Musicology/Ethnomusicology, Hugh Hodgson School of Music with graduate certificates in Women’s Studies & Interdisciplinary University Teaching Major Professor: Jean Kidula Project Description: Study of music at U.S. Civil War re-enactments during sesquicentennial celebrations

Hannah Waits

PhD candidate, Department of History (Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award winner) Major Professor: Bethany E. Moreton Project Description: Conservatism and the Great Commission