Edward Guiliano Global Fellowships
Overview
The Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship is meant to encourage graduate students in languages, literatures, and related fields to pursue transformative experiences by exploring research and learning opportunities beyond their immediate community. Through this opportunity, the Modern Language Association will provide PhD students in MLA-related disciplines awards up to $2,000 to support travel and research in support of work that aligns with any of the following three areas:
- Travel and research taking place more than 200 miles from the fellow’s university or formative home (city/country) toward the generation of a publishable peer-edited journal essay or other publishable outcomes.
- Research or scholarly activities related to the completion of a dissertation and degree that requires travel of more than 200 miles from the fellow’s university or formative home (city/country).
- Transformative experiential-learning exposure toward a potential career outside academia, such as positions with public humanities agencies, research and consulting firms, nonprofits of all sorts, and in various kinds of community-based or commercial enterprises that draw upon the skill set of a PhD in the humanities.
The deadline for the 2024 application is 10 July 2024 for projects that would occur between October 2024 and October 2025. Grant recipients will be honored at the awards ceremony during the 2025 MLA Annual Convention in New Orleans.
2023 Fellowship Recipients
The recipients of the 2023 Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship are:
- Sonia Adams (Saint John’s Univ., NY), “Cultivating Literary Excellence: The Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival as a Learner-Centered Education Model for Orienting Black Diasporic Feminist Literature”
- Ananya Bhardwaj (George Washington Univ.), “‘Country Roads, Take Me Home / To the Place I Belong’: Finding Home on a Burning Planet for East Indians and Bangladeshi Immigrants in Italy”
- Rohit Chakraborty (Emory Univ.), “Hindoo Holiday: New York Public Library”
- Marc Dadigan (Univ. of California, Davis), “Listening to Lendada Nur (Ancient, All-Knowing Salmon): A Linguistic Indigenous History of the First Pacific Coast Salmon Hatchery”
- Shaibal Dev Roy (Univ. of Southern California), “Anticolonial Readership and Affinity between the Nineteenth-Century US and India”
- Natalie El-Eid (Syracuse Univ.), “Druze Afterlives: Between Bodies and Borders”
- Marisol Fila (Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor), “Content and Form: The Black Press and Articulations of Blackness in Twenty-First- Century Buenos Aires and São Paulo”
- Aned Ladino (Georgetown Univ.), “Afro-Andean and Diasporic Oral Feminisms: Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador”
- Maria Litvan (Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York), “Ciro Rodriguez and the Clan Choñik: On the Presence of Absence”
- Bria Paige (Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick), “The (Im)Possibility: Exploring Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose and the Critical-Creative Method of Invention”
- Haider Shahbaz (Univ. of California, Los Angeles), “Anticolonial Relation: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Urdu Magazines, 1930–1990”
- Benjamin Williams (Carnegie Mellon Univ.), “Mediating Documentation: Race, Affective Governance, and the US-Mexico Border”
- Amal Zaman (Fordham Univ., Bronx), “Minor Figures: South Asian Femininities as Global Form”
Eligibility
Applicants must meet the following criteria:
- Applicants must have an active MLA membership at time of application and award.
- Applicants must be actively enrolled in a PhD program in the United States or Canada.
- Proposed travel must take place more than 200 miles from the student’s home or home institution.
- Proposed activity must take place within twelve months of the award (from October 2024 to October 2025).
Evaluation Criteria
Peer reviewers will evaluate applications based on the following criteria:
- Completeness: does the application fulfill all the requirements?
- Impact of travel or experience: does the application make a strong case for how the research-focused travel or the experiential-learning activity will impact their current projects and future trajectory?
- Intellectual merit, creativity, and critical intervention: does the proposed project make a strong case for its intellectual merit, creativity, or critical intervention?
- Feasibility: how realistic are the project’s goals, timeline, and budget?
The MLA anticipates making approximately 15 awards each year. Applicants will be notified about the status of their application in early September. Successful applicants must agree to submit a final report, which may be made publicly available.
For questions about the application process or issues related to the submission form, please contact Ayanni Cooper (acooper@mla.org).