Mary Hennessy Receives Mary Fair Croushore Fellowship

Congratulations to PhD student Mary Hennessy who received the Mary Fair Croushore Fellowship from U-M's Institute for the Humanities for 2018-19. Mary is undertaking an ambitious interdisciplinary dissertation called Handmaidens of Modernity: Gender, Labor, and Media in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, which examines the ways new media and technology affect female subjectivities in the first decades of the twentieth century. According to her letters of support, Mary is a student primed to make an important contribution to German studies.

Mary will join fifteen other faculty and graduate student fellows in a ten-month residency at the institute. Fellows pursue their research and participate in a weekly, cross-disciplinary seminar.

Calder Fong Awarded Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship

Congratulations to PhD candidate Calder Fong who was awarded the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship for 2018-19. The fellowship provides three terms of support for completion of his dissertation Bergbau, Tagebau, Umbau: A Cultural History of Design, Landscape Architecture, and Memory in the Remediation of Former Mining Sites in Germany. His work examines the redesign of decommissioned German coal mines in the 1990s, through which abandoned mine shafts, mountains of mining refuse, and desert-like strip mines became verdant post-industrial landscapes. The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship award is based on quality of the scholar’s research plan, progress on the project, and scholarly significance as well as faculty letters of recommendation.

Elizabeth McNeill wins Alan P. Cottrell Prize 

Elizabeth McNeill won the German Department's Alan P. Cottrell Prize for the best paper written in a German studies seminar over the course of 2017. Her paper, titled "The Self-Other in the Mirror: Polar Bears as Liminal Subjects in Yoko Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee," was selected for its breadth, its capacious references to both primary and secondary literature, its sense of purpose, and its clarity of presentation.

Rottmann Awarded IRWG/Rackham Community of Scholars Fellowship

German PhD student Andrea Rottmann was accepted as a summer fellow in this year's Community of Scholars at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, where she looks forward to working on a chapter from her dissertation, Queer Home Berlin? Everyday Life, Subjectivities, and Memory of Queer People in the Divided City, 1945-1970.

IRWG/Rackham Community of Scholars summer fellowships were granted to 10 graduate students from 10 disciplines, broadly ranging from the social sciences to the humanities and health-related fields.

The Community of Scholars program supports Rackham graduate students who are engaged in scholarly research or other creative projects focusing on women, gender or sexuality.

All awardees participate in a weekly seminar during May and June, and continue their research during July and August. Awardees present their work at a public symposium in the Fall semester.