Sonia Rupcic and Nishita Trisal have received Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships!

From The American Council of Learned Societies:

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the 2019 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows. The 67 fellows, who hail from 42 US universities, comprise one of the most institutionally diverse cohorts in the history of this fellowship. They were selected from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants through multiple stages of peer review. Now in its thirteenth year, the fellowship program offers promising graduate students a year of funding so that they can focus their attention on completing projects that form the foundations of their scholarly careers.

“The innovative research undertaken by our Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows represents the future of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences,” said ACLS program officer Valerie Popp. “The fellows’ work spans a broad range of time periods, geographic regions, and disciplines, including philosophy, literature, gender studies, music, history, and sociology. Amid such diverse research topics, several notable themes emerged this year, including the study of carceral states; the exploration of connections among culture, politics, and ecological change; and a focus on labor in communities around the world.”

The fellowship provides a $30,000 stipend and up to $8,000 in research funds and university fees to advanced graduate students in their final year of dissertation writing. The program, which is made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, also includes a faculty-led academic job market seminar, hosted by ACLS, to further prepare fellows for their postgraduate careers.

Sonia Rupcic

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships 2019
Doctoral Candidate
Anthropology
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Righting Sexual Wrongs? Personhood, Intent, and Sex in a former South African Homeland

In post-apartheid South Africa, justice is pursued in a variety of forums. This is especially the case with sexual harm, which is historically dealt with in a number of ways. From courtrooms to chiefs’ tribunals, church services to university grievance hearings, living rooms to hair salons, this project describes how survivors and their loved ones seek justice inside and outside of courtrooms. By following complaints of unwanted sex, this study argues that material and discursive practices of redress shape indeterminate experiences of undesirable sex into recognizable categories of transgression. The project finds that categories of harm arise from different notions of normative sex, intentionality, and personhood that crosscut sites of redress. This study opens new inquiries into the conception of legal pluralism while also answering a wider call for empirically grounded research on the perils and potentials of righting sexual wrongs by way of criminal prosecution and its others.

Nishita Trisal 

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships 2019
Doctoral Candidate
Anthropology
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Banking on Uncertainty: Debt, Default, and Violence in Indian-Administered Kashmir

“Banking on Uncertainty” examines the everyday life of banking and finance in politically volatile conditions. Based on 22 months of ethnographic and archival research conducted at a large bank in Indian-administered Kashmir in the wake of the region's 2016 uprising, the dissertation tracks the technical and routine work of bankers as they labored amidst continuous strikes and curfews. It also follows the bank's customers, who struggled to repay and renegotiate their debts during a time of ongoing uncertainty. Moving between the spaces of the bank branch, the corporate headquarters, the marketplace, the shopfront, and the home, “Banking on Uncertainty” probes the making of a local conflict economy, the adjudication of credit and debt, and the negotiation of economic life in projects of self-determination and sovereignty.