The Humanities Institute is thrilled to announce the twelve recipients of the 2022 UCSC Social Science Research Council-Dissertation Proposal Development Program award. Recipients come from a wide-range of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts Division departments, including Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Feminist Studies, Film and Digital Media, History, History of Art and Visual Culture, Latin American and Latino Studies, Literature, Music, and Sociology.
The Humanities Institute is pleased to work with the Division of Graduate Studies, the Humanities Division, the Social Sciences Division, and the Arts Division to continue to support graduate students through innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to research proposal training.
The 2022 recipients are:
Clara Bergamini, History
“Learning Nation and Enacting Empire Through Disaster”
Leonard Butingan, History
“Black Anti-Racism Activism and the Afterlife of Empire in Britain 1978-2000”
Susanna Collinson, History of Art and Visual Culture
“Pacific Experiments”
Anandi Gandhi, Anthropology
“Coexistent Futures: Elephant Socialities in South-East Asia”
Mario Gómez-Zamora, Latin American and Latino Studies
“Colonial Violence, Murder, and Strategies of Resistance among Queer P’urhépecha People in Michoacán and the United States”
Kaiya Gordon, Feminist Studies
“Abolition, Community Practices, and Gender Variance in the Transsexual News Telegraph Collection”
Aaron Samuel Mulenga, History of Art and Visual Culture
“Embodied Absence: The Phantom Load of the Tenga Tenga”
Lalu Esra Ozban, Film and Digital Media
“Koli Sinemaları: Sex Cinemas as Trans Sites of Memory, Community-Building, and Sex Work”
Matthew Polzin, Literature
“Speculative Biologies: Race, Gender, and Science in Feminist and Queer Utopian Fiction”
Koda Sokol, Sociology
“Feeling Gendered: Affect and the Relational Politics of Gender Recognition”
Summer Sullivan, Environmental Studies
“Fantasies of Farm Labor: Digital Agriculture’s New Kind of Worker in the Salinas Valley Lettuce Industry”
Alex Wand, Music
“Monarch Waystation Soundmap: Tracing the Migratory Corridors of the Western Monarch Butterfly”
The Dissertation Proposal Development program trains doctoral students to apply an interdisciplinary approach in the early stages of their graduate careers. Participants in the program receive financial and mentoring support for summer research and attend practical workshops in spring and fall that introduce them to a range of social science, cultural, and humanistic methodologies.
UC Santa Cruz was one of five universities selected to take part in the SSRC-DPD University Initiative program. We’ve helped cohorts of PhD students advance towards candidacy and develop their dissertation research and writing in dialogue with faculty and peers across divisions. Since the start of the grant, over 60 students have benefited from the DPD program.
This year’s program faculty co-lead administrators are Deborah Gould, Associate Professor of Sociology, and Muriam Haleh Davis, Assistant Professor of History.
Funding for this program has been generously provided by: UCSC Division of Graduate Studies, Humanities Division, Social Sciences Division, Arts Division, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The program is hosted and supported by The Humanities Institute.
Congratulations to all 2022 recipients!
