At the close of the academic year 2023-24, we held a celebration honoring, among others, our students who earned doctoral degrees this year. They are:
Patrick Cabell
Dissertation: The Truncated Independence of Latin America: Realism and the National-popular in Alejo CarpentierCommittee: Neil Larsen, Co-Chair (COM); Joshua Clover, Co-Chair (English and COM); and Christopher Connery (Literature and History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
Pat has also recently become a father! Valdivia Francie Cabell Zambrano was born on Oct 8, 2023—and she joined us at the party, which was delightful.
Kyle Proehl
Dissertation: Bomb the Crisis: Graffiti in Capitalist ModernityCommittee: Joshua Clover, Chair (English and COM); Robert Irwin (Spanish and Portuguese); and Neil Larsen (COM)
Kyle is currently Editorial Assistant for the James Baldwin Review, produced at Washington University in St. Louis.
Sean Sell
Dissertation: Beyond Two Worlds: Jaguar Consciousness in Contemporary Chiapas Maya NarrativeCommittee: Inés Hernández-Ávila, Chair (Native American Studies); Moradewun Adejunmobi (African American and African Studies); Arturo Arias, (Literatures and Languages, UC Merced)
Sean is currently teaching as a lecturer in COM, and he will continue in this position in 2024-25.
Xuesong Shao
Dissertation: Rural Matters: Politics, Aesthetics, and Affects of the Countryside in Chinese Literature and Film, 1942–2022Committee: Sheldon Lu, Chair (COM); Xiaomei Chen (East Asian Languages and Cultures); Gail Finney (German and COM); and Jaimey Fisher (German and Cinema and Digital Media)
Xuesong will be taking up a post-doctoral fellowship at National University of Singapore.
Heartiest congratulations to Pat, Kyle, Sean, and Xuesong!
News and updates on fellowships and other funding:
In 2023-24 the COM department was pleased to be able to support two of our doctoral students, Ross Hernández and Jihan Shaarawi, with dissertation-quarter fellowships.
We are proud to announce Ross Hernández has received an internal fellowship for dissertation work in 2024-25. Ross has recently been invited by la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Puebla, Mexico to work as a visiting scholar next year alongside professor of contemporary Mexican poetry, Ali Calderón.
Elmira Louie has been awarded a Professors for the Future fellowship and will join the cohort of participants in 2024-25. Elmira has also been accepted into the UC Humanities Research Institute's inaugural Experimental Critical Theory Seminar at UCLA next quarter! With the application open to all UC graduate students in humanities and social sciences, space for non-UCLA students was limited to five—so we are extremely pleased that Elmira was selected as a participant. This seminar "attempts to undo binary thinking through ternary positionality," a topic, Elmira notes, that is exactly aligned with her dissertation. Congratulations, Elmira!
Many COM graduate students have received competitive summer support.
Ben Fong and Mingrui Wen both received Letters and Science Dean’s summer support awards, while Laura Catterson received a Mondavi summer support award. Tianyun Hua received a Humanities Program Graduate Summer Fellowship. Additionally, Ruinong Yin received UC Davis travel grants for fieldwork in China and for the AIS biennial conference in Mexico City in August 2024.
Departmental summer funding for academic initative projects was awarded to Meher Gandhi, Sicily Lerner, Alicia Manno, Jihan Shaarawi, Mingrui Wen, Ruinong Yin, and Marmar Zakher.
I am also happy to share these updates concerning our graduate alums:
Amanda Batarseh (PhD 2018), Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at UC San Diego, gave a talk entitled “The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space” in the UC Davis Cultural Studies Graduate Group Spring 2024 colloquium series.
Kevin Dong (MA 2021) is a doctoral student in Asian Studies, Cornell University, Cornell, NY.
Anna Einarsdottir (PhD 2018) is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway.
Xiaolong (Dorothee) Hou (PhD 2021) is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA.
Fei Shi (PhD 2011) is an Instructor at Capilano University, British Columbia, Canada.
Zhenyu Xu (MA 2023) is a doctoral student in Chinese Literature, Cambridge University, UK.
Beichen Zu (MA 2021) is a doctoral student in History at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.