Funding Opportunities for Graduate Students

Amount

One $1,000 award.

Criteria

The student must submit a completed UCLA Ph.D. dissertation on women and/or gender utilizing a historical perspective in either literature or the arts. If planning to file a doctoral dissertation by June 2, 2008, applicant is eligible pending verification of filing status.

To apply

The application must contain the following materials in hard copy only:

Three copies of each:

• George Eliot Dissertation Award Cover Sheet
• Dissertation Abstract (1 page)
• Completed Dissertation
• Curriculum Vitae
• Transcripts (unofficial copy is acceptable)

One copy of:

• Letters of recommendation from two faculty members (one of which must be
  from the candidate's chair, usually the nominating faculty member).
  The letters should be sealed in an envelope with the recommender’s signature
  across the back flap.

Deadline

5:30 PM
Thursday, May 7, 2009

Alison Harvey

Alison Harvey currently holds a post-doctoral position in Humanities and English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her dissertation, “Irish Realism: Literary History and National Politics, 1870-1922” (UCLA, 2007), was
awarded the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) Adele Dalsimer Award for Distinguished Dissertation. Harvey has presented papers at national and international British and Irish Studies conferences and in 2006 presented “Gendering the Revival: Minor Realism in the Fin-de- Siècle Irish Novel” at the annual MLA Convention. An essay on Maria Edgeworth’s Irish, English, and Caribbean writings, “West Indian Obeah and English ‘Obee’: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” appears in New Essays on Maria Edgeworth (2006). Her project, “Irish Realism: Literary History and National Politics, 1870-1922,” investigates the complex relations between nationalism, gender, and literary form in the fin-de-siècle Irish novel. Focusing on writers Emily Lawless, Edith Somerville, Martin Ross, George Moore, and James Joyce, the dissertation examines prose imaginings and representations of Ireland during the Irish Revival, when drama and poetry were the favored forms of many writers working to imagine a new nation. Through the category of “minor realism,” the project brings into focus the politics and efficacy of realism as a mode of representing Ireland during a period when national politics and gendered allegories of the nation often occluded the lived realities of Irish women and the Irish underclass. The dissertation illuminates the dialogue between literary form and gendered and national politics and revises our understandings of realism and the genealogies of modernism.

Melissa Sodeman

Melissa Sodeman is recognized for her exceptional dissertation, “Wandering, Form, and the Sentimental Novel.” Sodeman recovers the writings and lives of eighteenth-century professional women writers who not only have been forgotten by present-day readers and dismissed by present-day scholars but who in their own day found their livelihoods and profits squandered by disreputable husbands acting within the full parameters of a patriarchalist law. Sodeman astutely shows in her dissertation how these professional women created the figure of the wandering woman to bring further fervor to others engaged in the work of vindicating the rights of women. And Sodeman’s work, her dissertation, continues that process: it is not only a historical project but a feminist one, asking us to remember and rethink our own aesthetic principles as we encounter these women who, in Sodeman’s words, “were forgotten not because of their obscurity, but because they were all too conspicuous.”

Nicole Horejsi

Nicole Horejsi’s dissertation project, entitled “Contesting Neoclassicism: The Limits of Classical Tradition in the Eighteenth Century,” contends that throughout the eighteenth century a number of Augustan writers, especially women, rewrote the classical tradition in order to create competing histories and mythologies that contested prevailing hierarchies and traditions.