Umd Students Win Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships
June 03, 2011
13 ARHU doctoral students receive Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships from the UMD Graduate School for 2011-2012.
13 ARHU doctoral students receive Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships from the UMD Graduate School for 2011-2012.ARHU doctoral students win over a fourth of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships for next year. The Graduate School awards approximately 40 Wylie Dissertation Fellowships per year and 13 are going to ARHU students. Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships are one-semester awards intended to support outstanding doctoral students who are in the final stages of writing their dissertation and whose primary source of support is unrelated to their dissertation. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships carry a stipend of $10,000 plus candidacy tuition remission and $800 toward the cost of health insurance.
ARHU Winners: Information about individual students will be added as it becomes available.
Aaron Bryant, American Studies
Robb Hernandez, American Studies
Adam Greenhalgh, Art History & Archaeology
Breanne Robertson, Art History & Archaeology
Jennifer Wellman, English
Jessica Johnson, History
Kimberly Welch, History
Elizabeth Picciuto, Philosophy
Yu Izumi, Philosophy
Sunyoung Lee, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Daniel Sender, School of Music
Rajani Bhatia, Women’s Studies
Julie Enszer, Women’s Studies
Additional Information:
Aaron Bryant
Bryant is curator for the James E. Lewis Museum of Art at Morgan State University. His past exhibits include “Epoch: The Legacy and Influence of Six Morgan Alumni,” “Most Daring Dream: Robert Houston Photography and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign;” and “William H. Johnson: An American Modern,” a national tour and book collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution. Bryant's honors include fellowships with the Smithsonian Institution, the Maryland Historical Society, the University of Maryland, the Association of African American Museums, and the American Association of Museums. He is also the recipient of the Chesapeake American Studies and Gertrude Johnson Williams Writing Awards. Additionally, his research has been used as content for exhibitions at the National Institutes of Health and Library of Medicine, as well as the National Electronics Museum. He has taught courses at Johns Hopkins University, as well as the University of Maryland, and his articles have appeared in Black Enterprise, The Crisis Magazine, Black Issues Book Review, Callaloo, and the New England Theatre Journal. Currently, he is completing a chapter for the two-volume text Sounds of Resistance: The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism. Bryant earned his A.B. in History from Duke, a certificate in Arts Management from New York University, and his M.F.A. in Arts Management from Yale.
Robb Hernandez
Hernandez is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of American Studies. His dissertation will be on the alternative archival formations and curatorial practices of gay men in the Chicano Art Movement in East Los Angeles, 1969-2009. He is the Cesar E. Chavez Dissertation Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program at Dartmouth College. In 2007 and 2008, he was the Program Coordinator of the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program and in 2010, he was a research associate for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. His book, "The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta--Cyclona Collection," UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2009, was published and received an award from the 2010 International Latino Book Awards. He has received numerous grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Dartmouth College, the National Association of Chicana/o Studies and the Cosmos Club Foundation in Washington, D.C.
Adam Greenhalgh
Greenhalgh’s dissertation, “Risky Business: Chance and Contingency in American Art, 1876–1907,” exposes and interprets hitherto unnoticed points of intersection between American visual culture and the rhetoric and logic of institutions and disciplines dedicated to rationalizing chance such as insurance, statistics, and probabilism during a period when popular, legal, economic, and scientific conceptions of the accident were undergoing considerable revision. His research has been supported by a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, 2009–2010, a Henry Luce Foundation Americanist Dissertation Research Award, Summer 2009, a Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship, 2008–2009, and a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2007–2008. Greenhalgh received a Michael J. Pelczar Award for Excellence in Graduate Study in 2009, in 2006 he received the Mark H. Sandler Teaching Award from the Department of Art History & Archaeology and a Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award from the Center for Teaching Excellence. At the conclusion of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship period, Greenhalgh will join the Department of Modern Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery, Washington, as a Graduate Curatorial Intern for 2011–2012.
Breanne Robertson
Robertson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at the University of Maryland and 2010-2011 Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her dissertation, “Forging a New World Nationalism: Ancient Mexico in United States Art and Visual Culture, 1933-1945,” elucidates United States artists’ appropriation of pre-Columbian themes in relation to the Latin American foreign policy initiatives of the Roosevelt administration. She has received grants from the Children’s Literature Association, University of Maryland Latin American Studies Center, Cosmos Club Foundation, and the State Historical Society of Iowa for travel to California, Iowa, Hawaii, and Mexico City to conduct archival research on her dissertation.
Robertson has presented various aspects of her research at symposia and conferences in the United States and Germany, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2011, International Association of Inter-American Studies Bi-Annual Conference, 2010, and National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Conference, 2009. In addition, she has published articles related to her dissertation in The Annals of Iowa, 2011, and Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, 2011/In press. Her current projects include presentations on pan-Americanism, prejudice, and public art in Southern California for the May 2011 Smithsonian Fellows Lectures in American Art and the November 2011 New England American Studies Association Conference. She plans to defend her dissertation in December 2011.
Jessica Johnson
Kimberly Welch
Welch is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Maryland and a doctoral fellow in Law and Social Science at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. Her research interests center on race, gender, and local legal culture in the antebellum U.S. South. Welch’s dissertation investigates the relationship between subordinate southerners—African Americans, both enslaved and free, and white women—and law in the Natchez District of Mississippi and Louisiana from 1820 to 1860. Her project asks if lower courts provided subordinated people with an opportunity to improve their daily lives and, if so, whether they succeeded in using law to challenge the hierarchical system of power in the planter-dominated South. Through a close analysis of over 2000 local court cases involving subordinate southerners, Welch attempts to demonstrate how free men and women of color, the enslaved, and white women used law to negotiate an improved place for themselves in the system of power that subordinated them. Welch’s work has been supported by the American Bar Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the MellonFoundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the American Historical Association, and the Cosmos Club Foundation.
Sunyoung Lee
Lee (aka Lee-Ellis) is a PhD Candidate in Second Language Acquisition program, who is receiving inter-disciplinary graduate training training via the IGERT program on language diversity at UMD. Her research centers around issues related to how bilingual children and adults learn two languages. In her dissertation, she examines the resilience of one’s native language by studying heritage language speakers, a group whose first language, typically the language of their immigrant parents, is no longer their dominant language. Her research has been featured as one of the research highlights of the nationwide NSF-IGERT program, and she has received several grants and awards from various agencies. Her dissertation research was awarded the NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grant in 2010. In addition, at the NSF-IGERT annual meeting held in May 2010, she received an award for communication excellence for her poster presentation on her heritage language research program. She also received an abstract award from the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) conference in 2010 and a travel award from American Educational Research Association in 2011. Two of her research projects on heritage language acquisition have been published in top-tier peer-reviewed journals, Language Testing and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. She has also been invited to write an entry in the upcoming Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition, Routledge.
Daniel SenderSender is currently a doctoral candidate in violin performance at the University of Maryland. In support of his dissertation, “Folk Elements in Twentieth-Century Hungarian Music,” Daniel accepted a 2010-2011 Fulbright Fellowship to study and perform research at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Prior to his year as a Fulbrighter, Daniel served as first violinist of the Adelphi String Quartet, the Graduate Fellowship String Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. Daniel is a native of Philadelphia and holds degrees in music performance and education from Ithaca College as well as a Master of Music degree from the University of Maryland. Named a Presser Scholar by the Theodore Presser Foundation, Daniel is grateful to have been the recipient of numerous artistic grants and scholarships that have sustained his academic career. Mr. Sender served for four years as the violinist of the Annapolis Chamber Players and his recording of Walter Gieseking’s chamber music has an expected release in 2011 under the Naxos label. Recent appearances include concerts at the Erdődy Palace, Budapest, Universität der Kunste, Berlin; Franz Liszt Academy of Music (Old Academy), Budapest; the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National History Museum in Washington, D.C. Daniel is a student of Professor David Salness.