Becky Bloom - Rackham International Research Award, Graduate Student Research Grant, Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, and Lincoln Memorial Fellowship

This year, I received a Rackham International Research Award and a Graduate Student Research Grant to support field research related to my dissertation, Pictures to Live By: Uncovering an Iconography of the Tibetan Buddhist Monastic Code. This project focuses on a heretofore unexamined text by the largely forgotten Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876-1933), and a series of murals directly related to this work. The two awards will fund travel to the Tibet Autonomous Region where I will perform the culminating phase of my fieldwork: the first-ever documentation of three of these murals, including what is likely the original work; and an investigation of related murals in Tibet, particularly those commissioned by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. I was also awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship to support my dissertation writing during the upcoming academic year. All this comes on the heels of a year spent at the Smithsonian's Freer|Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC as the University of Michigan's Freer Fellow. At F|S, I've been conducting research and contributing to a new exhibition of Buddhist art that opens in October 2017. The generous support of the Lincoln Memorial Fellowship will allow me to finish this project in DC and pursue my research on the Tibetan Plateau. 

Anna Johnson - Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship

I received the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship, which offers ten months of stipend support for PhD candidates in Buddhist Studies. I will be spending this time writing my dissertation in Ann Arbor. The topic of my research is three-vow theory in Tibetan Buddhism, which is a type of religious literature that analyzes the interrelation, compatibility, and dissonance across the three sets of vows taken by Tibetan Buddhists: monastic, bodhisattva, and tantra vows. I look particularly at texts by prominent Tibetan monk scholars of the fifteenth century, and trace the genealogy of their ideas back to Indian Buddhist philosophy of the first through tenth centuries. During the period of this fellowship, I will be writing chapters three and four, which focus on the works of Tsong kha pa and Shakya Chokden whose theories on the three vow sets reflect their divergent understandings of the nature of reality. 

Randeep Singh Hothi - Charlotte W. Newcome Doctoral Disseration Fellow

I have been named a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow for 2017 at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. My  dissertation project, tentatively titled Sikhism Will Be Televised: Recognition and Religion-Making on British Sikh Television Networks, investigates how British Sikhs present Sikhism on community operated television. The award will support dissertation writing for the 2017-2018 academic year. I have also received support for my dissertation project from the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Narith Ta - Southeast Asia FLAS Fellowship

The funding I was awarded for this summer is the Southeast Asia Summer FLAS Fellowship for Khmer language study. It has given me the opportunity this summer to attend the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) 2017 at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Through the program, I hope to not only improve my Khmer language ability in all aspects, but to further prepare myself for prospective research in Cambodia and in South Korea with research on migrant labor. I am very excited to be taking part in this program not only in contribution to my research, but for myself.

For 2017-2018, I was also awarded the Southeast Asia Academic Year FLAS Fellowship for Filipino language study. Through continued support in taking Filipino language and further Asian studies courses, I hope to partake in prospective field research in the Philippines and refine my research on Southeast Asian migrant labor in South Korea. The Filipino language course at the university has provided me with a community that positively promotes further advancement of Southeast Asian studies. It has been greatly rewarding taking Filipino, and I believe that it can only keep getting better.