UCSC SSRC-DPD Program
UC Santa Cruz is one of five universities to take part in the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) University Initiative program. With a three-year grant from SSRC, we launched a Dissertation Proposal Development program meant to promote interdisciplinary scholarship and train doctoral students to apply these approaches in the early stages of their graduate careers.
At UCSC, the SSRC-DPD project supports dissertation proposal development through interdisciplinary peer discussion and faculty perspectives; training in key research and related professional skills; introduction to a range of social science, cultural, and humanistic methodologies; and practical workshop activities to advance PhD students’ progress towards candidacy and dissertation research/writing. As students shift from coursework and exploratory research to independent, original research, they will learn from their peers and benefit from the program’s emphasis on communicating across disciplinary boundaries.
Project Directors
Debbie Gould, Sociology (2018 – 2022)
Muriam Haleh Davis, History (2022)
Grace Delgado, History (2016 – 2019, 2021)
Miriam Greenberg, Sociology (2016 – 2018, 2020)
Project Participants
The UCSC SSRC-DPD program welcomes participants from a wide-range of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts Division departments including History, Environmental Studies, Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, Sociology, Latin American and Latino Studies, and History of Art and Visual Culture. Congratulations to the 2022 Fellows! See the list of past participants here.
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”