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.
  • Travel must take place within the same fiscal year that the application is submitted. 
  • 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 - Application closed for Fall 2024; Application will reopen in January 2025 for Spring 2025
  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."

  • Sheyda Safaeyan, PhD English Literature
    • My research focuses on the naturalized bodies in the Anthropocene and the posthuman transformations that "disorganize" the human organism and challenges the nature-culture divide at its core. I developed the concept of disorganic entelechy as a model to examine the diverse representations of the posthuman in contemporary speculative fiction and film that share similarities with the behavioral patterns of vegetal beings—representations that offer a worldview capable of extending our subjectivity beyond binaristic models. I will be presenting my paper, titled "A Riplock into the Future: Disorganic Entelechy in David Croneneberg's Crimes of the Future" at the 45th International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA45) this March. The Graduate Research Fund will help cover some of the expenses of the trip, enabling me to attend the conference and engage in productive conversations with eminent scholars in the field. 
  • Sojin Shin, MFA Creative Writing
    • For my research, I will interview my grandfather and grandmother to reconstruct our family history. Through this project, I will be able to hear first-hand accounts on how the occupation of Korea by Japan and the Korean War has affected our family members' lives. I will also have a chance to explore the fracturedness and unreliability of orally passed down family histories. The research funds will go towards purchasing my plane ticket. 
  • Onur Ural, PhD SLAT
    • My doctoral research study investigates the current state of what technologies are available for language educators’ use inside and outside K-12 schools and universities and if and to what extent second and foreign language K-12 teachers and university instructors have digital competence to best benefit from these tools in their class settings. A collaborative teacher development series will be formed, wherein language teaching professionals engage in mutual learning and support. By fostering a culture of shared governance and peer collaboration, these educators empower themselves to navigate the complexities of integrating educational technologies into their teaching practices. This research study will outline the steps and processes involved in implementing this collaborative teacher development series. All funding will be allocated to participating second and foreign language K-12 teachers, university instructors, and graduate associates employed in language departments at universities.
  • Meng Wang, PhD English Literature
    • My project, titled "The Ecocatastrophe Storytelling of Toxic Chemical Pollution and Environmental Injustice of the Global South in Environmental Nonfiction Literature," is a simplified version of one section of my dissertation for the 2024 MELUS Conference. Through the close reading of Marla Cone's Silent Snow: The Snow Poisoning of the Arctic and Beth Gardiner's Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution, my project focuses on exploring the significance of the ecocatastrophe narratives in manifesting the horrors of air/water pollution and social injustice haunting the indigenous communities of the Arctic Circle and the poor/working-class communities of the Global South (e.g., India and China) from the theoretical perspectives of environmental inequality/racism, ecological socialism, and global capitalism. Also, in this article, I will study a specific environmental literary genre—environmental journalism——to conceptualize how environmental journalists narrate their experiences of field trips and in-person interviews and incorporate their interpretations of environmental science and humanities knowledge into the ecocatastraphe narratives. I am grateful for the financial support the Graduate Student Research Fund provides for my travel to Dallas in April to present my paper at the MELUS Conference.  

  • Astrid Liu, MFA Creative Writing

    • I presented my research on Cantonese translation as part of a panel titled "Language and Power in Literary Translation" at the 47th American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference in October 2024. In conversation with Chenin Jiang, Yeewa Lau, and Louise Law, all Cantonese translation powerhouses, I explored the relationship between language and power in translation. Considering the power dynamics in both the source and target languages, we discussed the implications for inclusion in translating from and into specific languages. We also strategized ways to build collective platforms that amplify lesser-heard voices, fostering transnational connections over shared struggles through translation. The Graduate Research Fund supplemented my travel costs to ALTA, allowing me to have generative conversations with fellow translators both on the panel and throughout the conference.

  • Issam Rian, PhD SLAT
    • Issam's project explores the impact of AI-generated feedback on the metacognitive judgments of L2 writers. Focusing on how these writers perceive and evaluate their own writing within different genres, his research aims to offer insights into the effectiveness of Large Language Models like ChatGPT in second-language writing classrooms. By examining the interplay between AI feedback and student metacognition, Issam seeks to shed light on the potential of AI tools to enhance language learning and teaching, while also probing the unique human ability of self-reflection in the context of rapidly advancing technologies.
  • Sheyda Safaeyan, PhD English Literature
    • As part of a project within environmental humanities and social justice, my research surveys the figure of the posthuman in multi-ethnic American speculative texts through the lens of vegetal life. Through an ecological perspective centered on vegetal ontology, I show how the plant’s positionality as an exploited marginalized species and resistance to that status, can be used as a framework for analyzing the racialized, gendered, sexualized, and naturalized characters’ defiance of capitalist-colonialist systems and their ongoing toxic marks on our socio-ecological scene. This Graduate Research Fund helps cover the expenses of a conference on Speculative Fiction across Media that I participated in this semester, where I presented a portion of my work titled "The (Xeno)phyto-ontology of Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern Reach Trilogy" to an audience of experts in the field. 
  • Maryam Vaezi, PhD RCTE

    • Grounded in the theorizations of the interconnected relationships between teachers' emotional trajectories, beliefs, and professional identity, this study draws on an integrated framework to explore international writing instructors' cognition, emotion, and identity development considering the role of the various ecologies of teaching in shaping each of these constructs. By providing enhanced knowledge of the identity trajectories, affective states, and beliefs of international writing teachers throughout their careers, this research offers opportunities for teacher trainers and supervisors to design targeted pedagogical interventions within teacher education programs. Such interventions have the potential to enhance writing teachers’ instructional practices and foster the development of more positive and empowered identities. The financial support provided by the English Department will be allocated to compensate participants for their contribution to the research, which entails engaging in interviews and completing narrative frames. Additionally, a portion of the funds will be designated for the transcription of interview data, ensuring accuracy and facilitating thorough analysis.