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Faculty, Ph.D. candidates win fellowships for humanities, social science research

By Kathleen Maclay

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has announced its 2015 fellowship recipients from the humanities and related social sciences, including four UC Berkeley professors, as well as eight doctoral candidates and two newly-minted Berkeley Ph.D.s.

The Berkeley recipients from the professorship ranks are:

Faculty winners

Faculty fellowship winners include Leigh Reiford, Beate Fricke, Winnie Wong and Kevis Goodman.

  • Beate Fricke, an associate professor of the history of art who teaches European medieval art and architecture. She received an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship to research the complex, multi-dimensional histories of medieval objects, drawing from site visits, workshops and case studies from medieval Europe, the central Islamic lands and Christian kingdoms on their peripheries.
  • Kevis Goodman, an associate professor of English, who teaches and researches 17th-century and 18th-century British literature. She has been awarded an ACLS Fellowship to pursue work on Enlightenment medicine and romantic poetics.
  • Leigh Raiford, an associate professor of African American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies conducts research around race, gender and visual culture. She has received an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for work on visualizing travel and “gendering” of the African diaspora.
  • Winnie Won Yin Wong, an assistant professor of rhetoric and art history whose work focuses on artistic authorship and the interactions between China and the West, is a double winner. She received an ACLS Fellowship to explore Canton’s trade and painting from 1700-1842, and a Luce/ACLS Collaborative Reading Workshop Grant in China Studies to research Canton’s urban space and social networks from 1819-1829.

Doctoral candidates receiving ACLS awards include:

  • Kris Anderson of Buddhist Studies, who received the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, for her work on roots of tantric Buddhist funerary ritual.
  • Jeffrey Blevins of English was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship to work on the poetry of logic in America and England 1895-1930.
  • Bathseda Demuth of history will use a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for her work on “The Power of Place: Modern Ideology and Arctic Ecology in the Bering Straits, 1848-1988.”
  • Rebecca Elliott of sociology has received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for research on social classification and climate change risk distribution in the United States.
  • Matthew Don McMullen of Buddhist Studies has received a Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies to pursue research on the development of esoteric Buddhism in early medieval Japan.
  • Emily Ng of anthropology has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for work on madness and spirits in contemporary China.
  • Jesse Watson of history has received a Luce/ACLS Predissertation Summer Travel Grant in China Studies for work using excavated documents to uncover perspectives on early Chinese empires.
  • Eloise Wright of history was awarded a Luce/ACLS Predissertation Summer Travel Grant in China Studies to pursue research on colonial language acquisition in Yunnan from 1253-1659.

The two new Berkeley Ph.D.s to receive ACLS Public Fellows awards are:

  • Keerthi Potluri of rhetoric, who has been tapped as a strategic outreach manager for the Central Park Conservancy.
  • Nilofar Gardezi, a newly-minted Ph.D. in English who has been appointed as a program impact analyst with the Bay Area Video Coalition as part of the ACLS Public Fellows Program.

The Public Fellows program places recent Ph.D.s from the humanities and social sciences in two-year staff positions at partnering organizations in government and the nonprofit sector. Fellows are chosen for their academic and extra-academic accomplishments as well as their demonstrated commitment to pursuing a career in the nonprofit or public sectors. The fellowship made possible with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aims to expand the reach of doctoral education in the U.S. by demonstrating the wide applications of advanced study of the humanities.