Graduate Student Summer Research
Summer 2019 was busy and productive for graduate students in Romance Studies. Several doctoral candidates had the opportunity to travel for their dissertation research thanks to privately funded grants.
Two graduate students in the French & Francophone Studies program received McCulloch Dissertation Research Travel Fellowship. Emma Monroy used her grant to spend time in several museums in Guadeloupe and Martinique for her project on collaborations between writers and visual artists in the Francophone Caribbean. During her stay, Emma was also able to interview artist Victor Anicet, friend of the well-known writers Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, and Bernard Lagier, the Assistant Director of the cultural center, Tropiques Atrium. Thanks to her fellowship, Wendy Combs traveled to the French National Library in Paris to make headway on her dissertation research on 19th-century fantastic novels.
With help from a Lupton Summer Travel Fellowship, Rhi Johnson spent several weeks in the library of the Royal Academy of Galician and the National Library of Portugal to further her dissertation research on the sociocultural history of water in 19th-century Iberian writing. Rhi reports that this research trip also gave her the valuable opportunity to practice her Galician and Portuguese language skills.
The Isabella Payne Cooper Award in Italian provided support for Tessa Bullington to travel to Italy to complete research for her dissertation, “Textual Healing: Gender, Genre & Disease at the Sixteenth-Century Italian Court.” Tessa spent two weeks in Venice both for her own research and to participate in an international symposium on the material culture of sixteenth-century northern Italy organized by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Warwick.
Two students in the Italian Studies program deepened their research in archives in Italy with help from Debbie Schenker Dissertation Travel Fellowships. Giorgia Bordoni spent the summer in the Archives of Futurism in Rome where she explored literary and visual artifacts relevant to her dissertation on “literary war machines” in 20th century Italy. Toni Veneri traveled to Rome, Venice, and Modena to gather crucial material for his dissertation on the “maritime and imperial imagination” in medieval and Renaissance Venice.
Closer to home, recipients of the Debbie Schenker Archival Fellowship Michele Cammelli and Megan Anne Fenrich worked with previously uncatalogued Italian manuscripts in the Rare Book Collection of Wilson Library. These students will be presenting their research discoveries at Wilson Library on October 4.