Graduate Student Research Fund

The Graduate Student Research Fund is set up for English Department graduate students to finance travel costs associated with conducting research or field work.

Eligibility

  • Awardee may receive funding for only ONE research project per fiscal year (July 1-June 30). The award is for $500 to be disbursed to the students Bursar's Account.
  • Applicants are encouraged to match these funds with other sources of support such as the SBSRI Pre-Dissertation Fund, GIDPAC, or a GIDP student research support fund.
  • All Literature, RCTE, Creative Writing, EAL, and SLAT GATs and Non-GATs who have a University business purpose for the travel are eligible.
  • All graduate students who teach for the Department of English during the academic year of funding request, who have a University business purpose for the travel are eligible. 
  • Applicants must be University of Arizona graduate or professional students at the time of application and over the duration of the proposed travel.

You can also apply for a travel grant through the GPSC.

Applying for Funding

  1. Applications are due twice a year (October 1 and February 1) to review research projects that will occur within a calendar year of the due date.
  2. Fill out the Graduate Student Research Fund Application 
  3. Click "Submit". Assign the next participant and route the form to Grad Program Coordinator, Stephanie Mao (Participant 2).
  4. Grad Program Coordinator will confirm receipt of application and will share with English Department Program Directors and Department Head.

For additional travel funding, you can also apply for a travel grant with the Graduate and Professional Student Council.

Reviews

Applications will be reviewed every semester at a meeting of the English Department Program Directors and Department Head. Graduate students will be notified whether or not funding is available. 

Payment

Students selected to receive funds will have them awarded via their Bursar's Account. Please note that funds may be subject to taxation. 

Questions?

If you have any questions about the process or special conditions involving your project, please contact Stephanie Mao, at smao@arizona.edu. 

Past Awardees

  • Jaime Mejia Mayorga, PHD SLAT

    • "Indigenous Miskitu Teachers’ Stories: A Case Study of the Intersection of Indigeneity in their Experiences as Teachers of English in the Public Education System of Honduras"
  • Meng Wang, PhD English Literature
    • "The Mixed-Race Woman's Sense of Place and Destructive Power in Jane Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea"

  • Kelli Lycke, PhD RCTE

    • For my dissertation, I am creating a film-book which uses readings of archival materials alongside oral histories to explore the history of Santa Rita, NM. Santa Rita—the townsite for the Chino Mine—was once the fourth largest copper mine in the world. Between 1965-1970, Santa Rita was evacuated and demolished to expand the mining pit. This film-book is a case study investigating how such a community intervenes with and persists through a loss of material space. I will use the grant to purchase necessary camera equipment for this project. 
  • Sheyda Safaeyan, PhD English Literature
    • My research explores how a posthumanist approach to ethics may mitigate the pace of societal and planetary disasters caused by hubristic humanistic paradigms. I investigate the perspectives, representation, and narrative possibilities of posthumanism in post-1960 American Speculative fiction and film, zooming in on alien encounter narratives that provide my research with nonhuman actants whose entanglements with humans lead to variegated forms of posthuman futures. I argue that what I call “posthuman blossoming,” or generative and proliferative modes of becoming that these narratives portray, may subvert the foreclosed futurity of the current global capital that extracts and destroys all life forms for profit. This fund will facilitate my meeting with some of the prominent scholars, writers, and publishers in science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature and film, and engage in productive conversations about my research specifically with those scholars whose work I frequently quote in my writing. 
  • Astrid Liu, MFA Creative Writing
    • The English Graduate Student Research Fund Award will help fund my travel back to Hong Kong, the city where my parents were born and raised. I plan to research the difference between Hong Kong Cantonese and Cantonese poetry with a fellow poet at Hong Kong University.  In Hong Kong, I will also conduct research for my novel The Mushroom King, which follows a young queer Chinese American woman willingly transplanting from her hometown of San Francisco to Arizona. My goal is for my work to act as a stepping stone for other diasporic people struggling to find access points to culture that aren’t exclusively tied to their birth family. 

  • Jennifer Kennedy, PhD English Literature

    • My research into Forster revolves around his use of echoes. As disembodiments of spirit or energy, ghosts are echoes of the living, and I am researching the function of these specters in colonial and post-colonial texts that are connected through Forster's A Passage to India. These funds will allow me to spend more time researching as well as conversing with other scholars interested in similar topics. These funds will also supplement the travel for my past presentation at the October 25-30 PAMLA conference as well as the upcoming ICFA conference, where I plan to deliver a more refined paper that focuses on presence even in absence. This work includes the work of Hugh Howey's Wool and the television adaptation, "Silo."