Graduate students from the Division of the Humanities were well represented among the recipients of dissertation fellowships announced last month by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Timothy Grinsell, Nathaniel Miller, and Chelsea Burns received Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships, while Solveig Nelson received the Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. The fellowships are designed to assist these PhD students with research funds and time to finish their dissertations.

Linguistics doctoral candidate Timothy Grinsell studies linguistic vagueness, and his dissertation, Semantic Indecision, applies the branch of economics concerning collective decision making to account for linguistic variation. “I’m honored and grateful to have been selected by the fellowship committee,” Grinsell said.

Nathanial Miller, a doctoral candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is writing his dissertation, Tribal Poetics in Early Arabic Poetry: The Case of Ashʿār Banī Hudhayl, on the collected poetry of an Arab tribe called Hudhayl. Miller is presently working on translating the tribe’s approximately 4,600 lines of poetry into English.  “The fellowship should allow me to really polish the translation and have it as an appendix to the dissertation,” said Miller.

Music doctoral candidate Chelsea Burns will use the fellowship to complete Listening for Modern Latin America: Identity and Representation in Concert Music, 1920-1940, which discusses the period’s landmark compositions from Mexico and Brazil, paying close attention to the multiple meanings these compositions conveyed in national and international settings.

Solveig Nelson, a doctoral candidate in Art History, studies early video. The Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art will assist her in writing her dissertation, Direct Action, Mediated Bodies: How Early Video Changed Art, a look at midcentury image-based practices in the United States from which video art emerged.