Presented By: Department of English Language and Literature
Diversity Committee Fall Symposium
The Diversity Committee invites you to a presentation of four of our five Summer Award Grantees, on Tuesday Oct 9th, at 11am in Angell Hall 3222, as the Diversity Committee Fall Symposium.
Come and find out what they did with their Summer Grants – and find out how you can apply yourself for one of these grants.
We are also looking for two PhD and two undergraduate students to join our Diversity Committee (meet once a month, read exciting project applications like the ones below, think about how to foster diversity agendas for our department, develop your leadership skills). Please contact Petra Kuppers at petra@umich.edu if you are interested/want to nominate someone!
Annika Pattenaude
About me:
I am 4th year PhD in L&L. I'm a California native, and I love to swim. I study medieval literature, and my dissertation examines (or will examine) the intersection of aesthetics and affect in late medieval poetry.
About my project:
This summer, under the mentorship of Hadji Bakara, I designed a literature course on human rights in the premodern world. To conduct this project, I compiled a bibliography of sources about rights in the classical, medieval, and early modern periods, and then organized select texts by theme: e.g., "Destabilizing the Human" and "Refugees, Exiles, and Aliens." Overall, a main goal of this course is to map a long history of human rights in order to discover how people made claims to or were restricted from rights in the premodern world.
Elinam Agbo
About me:
I am a second year MFA candidate (fiction) in the Helen Zell Writers' Program. I was born in Ghana and moved to the U.S. when I was ten. I grew up in Kansas, and I love Chicago (where I went to college).
About my project:
This summer, I wrote the first draft of a Young Adult novel, exploring black girlhood with a focus on my protagonist's relationship with her mother and her hair. The story was set in a surreal world where bureaucracy meets fairy tale characters, a world adjacent to ours but not quite ours. I shifted between two perspectives, one in prose and the other in verse, and I worked with my faculty mentor, Laura Kasischke, who is well versed in fiction and poetry.
Akosua Afiriyie-Hwedie (presentation via hand-out)
About me:
I'm a 2nd year MFA in poetry. I’m Zambian-Ghanaian and was raised in Botswana. My work is a journey in navigating home as a multitude of places and as more than just a physical space. Home can be many things, a mother, a language, a word etc.
About my project:
My mentor for the summer was Professor Ruth Behar (a cultural anthropologist who specializes in concepts of home, diaspora, displacement, immigration, travel, ethnographic research and methods specific to native anthropological research). With the help of Professor Behar and the Diversity Committee grant, I visited historic sites and interviewed people in both Ghana and Botswana. Thereafter, I produced a collection of poems which expound upon meanings of home (as physical space and beyond), particular to people indigenous to those spaces.
David Wade
About me:
I am a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction from the small rustbelt city of Washington, PA. My interests include hip hop, theology, mixed martial arts, and speculative fiction. My thesis is a collection of short stories about my hometown and the people who’ve never left.
About my project:
This summer, under the mentorship if Van Jordan, I worked on a poetry collection that examined the idea of “the wake” a as perpetual state of melancholy and subjugation unique to the African-American and global black experience found in Christina Sharpe’s monograph, In the Wake, among similar claims by other poets and scholars. The project seeks to challenge the narrative that the black experience is evenly transmuted across generation in perpetuity with no foreseeable expiration date.
Rackham Diversity Allies Program Spring/Summer Mentorship Grants
The Spring/Summer Mentorship Grants are for second, third, and fourth-year PhD L&L, JPEE, and E&WS students and first-year MFA students, and applications are due late in the Winter Semester.
Come and find out what they did with their Summer Grants – and find out how you can apply yourself for one of these grants.
We are also looking for two PhD and two undergraduate students to join our Diversity Committee (meet once a month, read exciting project applications like the ones below, think about how to foster diversity agendas for our department, develop your leadership skills). Please contact Petra Kuppers at petra@umich.edu if you are interested/want to nominate someone!
Annika Pattenaude
About me:
I am 4th year PhD in L&L. I'm a California native, and I love to swim. I study medieval literature, and my dissertation examines (or will examine) the intersection of aesthetics and affect in late medieval poetry.
About my project:
This summer, under the mentorship of Hadji Bakara, I designed a literature course on human rights in the premodern world. To conduct this project, I compiled a bibliography of sources about rights in the classical, medieval, and early modern periods, and then organized select texts by theme: e.g., "Destabilizing the Human" and "Refugees, Exiles, and Aliens." Overall, a main goal of this course is to map a long history of human rights in order to discover how people made claims to or were restricted from rights in the premodern world.
Elinam Agbo
About me:
I am a second year MFA candidate (fiction) in the Helen Zell Writers' Program. I was born in Ghana and moved to the U.S. when I was ten. I grew up in Kansas, and I love Chicago (where I went to college).
About my project:
This summer, I wrote the first draft of a Young Adult novel, exploring black girlhood with a focus on my protagonist's relationship with her mother and her hair. The story was set in a surreal world where bureaucracy meets fairy tale characters, a world adjacent to ours but not quite ours. I shifted between two perspectives, one in prose and the other in verse, and I worked with my faculty mentor, Laura Kasischke, who is well versed in fiction and poetry.
Akosua Afiriyie-Hwedie (presentation via hand-out)
About me:
I'm a 2nd year MFA in poetry. I’m Zambian-Ghanaian and was raised in Botswana. My work is a journey in navigating home as a multitude of places and as more than just a physical space. Home can be many things, a mother, a language, a word etc.
About my project:
My mentor for the summer was Professor Ruth Behar (a cultural anthropologist who specializes in concepts of home, diaspora, displacement, immigration, travel, ethnographic research and methods specific to native anthropological research). With the help of Professor Behar and the Diversity Committee grant, I visited historic sites and interviewed people in both Ghana and Botswana. Thereafter, I produced a collection of poems which expound upon meanings of home (as physical space and beyond), particular to people indigenous to those spaces.
David Wade
About me:
I am a second-year MFA candidate in Fiction from the small rustbelt city of Washington, PA. My interests include hip hop, theology, mixed martial arts, and speculative fiction. My thesis is a collection of short stories about my hometown and the people who’ve never left.
About my project:
This summer, under the mentorship if Van Jordan, I worked on a poetry collection that examined the idea of “the wake” a as perpetual state of melancholy and subjugation unique to the African-American and global black experience found in Christina Sharpe’s monograph, In the Wake, among similar claims by other poets and scholars. The project seeks to challenge the narrative that the black experience is evenly transmuted across generation in perpetuity with no foreseeable expiration date.
Rackham Diversity Allies Program Spring/Summer Mentorship Grants
The Spring/Summer Mentorship Grants are for second, third, and fourth-year PhD L&L, JPEE, and E&WS students and first-year MFA students, and applications are due late in the Winter Semester.
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