The Glasscock Center for Humanities Research annually funds up to ten Graduate Research Fellowships at $2,000 each. Departments can nominate up to two graduate students to be considered for these awards. To be eligible, students in affiliated departments have to be working on a Doctoral dissertation or Masters thesis but could be at the initial stages of their projects. Students are expected to work closely with their advisors on a project description, rationale for the grant, and budget. The budget might include conference participation and travel, fieldwork or archival work, or it might simply be for research materials. The outcome should be a dissertation or a thesis, or a significant portion thereof. These students will make up the community of graduate scholars who populate the Graduate Colloquium Series (five each semester). They are required to participate for a semester in the Graduate Colloquium Series and use the experience as a tool to improve their own writing and projects and help each other to improve the quality of the work being produced as a group.

Academic Year 2020-2021

Alexander Crist | Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy

Alexander received his BA in Philosophy from Saint Vincent College and MA in Philosophy from Duquesne University and is currently a fifth year PhD student in Philosophy at Texas A&M University.  He, also, recently defended an MA thesis in English at Texas A&M University.  His general area of focus is on continental European philosophy since Kant, with an emphasis on philosophical hermeneutics, aesthetics, poetics, and philosophy and literature.  Specifically, his research interests concern the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the poetry and prose of Paul Celan and Herman Melville.  Alexander’s dissertation project turns to the works of Celan and Melville in order to navigate three issues in contemporary hermeneutic thought that speak to the limits of interpretation and understanding: embodied experience, testimony, and originary ethics.

 

Landon Sadler | Ph.D. Candidate, English

Landon Sadler is a 5^th-year PhD in the English Department at Texas A&M. He has certificates in both women’s and gender studies and film and media studies. His scholarly interests include 20^th- and 21^st-century American literature, popular culture studies, and queer theory. His dissertation project, “Time Will Tell: Trumpism, Dystopian Literature, and Queer Ethics of Care,” examines recent queer dystopian cultural productions such as Janelle Monáe’s emotion picture Dirty Computer and Charlie Jane Anders’ novel All the Birds Sky. He argues that contemporary queer dystopian cultural production forwards a radical queer ethics of care as a transformational response to Trumpism. Landon Sadler is also the current co-president of the LGBTQA Graduate Group at A&M and a Graduate and Professional Student Government senator.

 

Leanee Díaz Sardiñas | Ph.D. Candidate, Hispanic Studies

Leanee Díaz Sardiñas is a fifth year doctoral candidate in the Department of Hispanic Studies. She holds a B.A. in Spanish Philology from the Universidad de La Habana, a PhD. in North American Studies from the Universidad de Alcalá. Her principal research interest center on Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Her research agenda focuses on two topics: the notions of identity and nationality. Current research explores Protestant groups in Cuba as agents against allowing same-sex marriage.

 

Nia Wilson | Ph.D. Candidate, Performance Studies

Nia Wilson is a graduate student of the Performance Studies Department at Texas A&M University. They are conducting research on bachata dance communities in New York City. Their research interests include cross-cultural and queer navigations of intimacy through dance and transnational adoption and racial identity. They received a bachelor’s degree in Literature and Theatre from New York University Abu Dhabi.