Through the Edward M. Wise Dissertation Fellowship the Humanities Center offers $12,000 in support each year to one student in the final stages of writing his or her dissertation. The recipient receives the stipend over an eight-month period.

Applicants for this fellowship must be doctoral candidates writing dissertations in the humanities, arts, or related disciplines. These disciplines include philosophy, language, linguistics, literature, history, jurisprudence, archaeology, comparative religion, ethics, the arts, those aspects of social sciences that have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods, and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment.

We congratulate following winners for the excellent dissertation research toward the fulfillment of their PhD degrees in the humanities at Wayne State.

Awardees: 

2009-2010

Elizabeth J. Durham Smith - Communication
"The Intersection of Image, Rhetoric and Witnessing:  A Rhetorical Examination of the Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse Scandal

Renuka Gusain - English
"On Beauty and Ethics in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries"

Maria D. Ramos - Classical & Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
"Jorge Volpi's Trilogy as Mirror, Window and Bridge of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Mexican Postmodern Literature"

2008-2009

Justin Prystash
"Victorian Frames of Time: Science, Temporality, and Subjectivity in the Nineteenth Century"

2007-2008

Victoria M. Abboud - English
"Nurturing Nature: Women and the Outdoors in the Brontës and Gaskell 1847-1855"

James A. Buccellato
Political Science

2006-2007

Naoki Kambe - Communication
"The Rhetoric of "Proper" Citizenship in Contemporary Japan: A Case of the Japanese Hostage Crisis in Iraq"

Kathryn Beard - History
"Higher than those of their race of Less Fortunate Advantages': Race, Ethnicity, and Political Leadership in Detroit's African American Community 1885-1940"

2005-2006

Tara Hayes, English
"Jonson and Women"

Candace Mary Beutell Gardner - German & Slavic Studies
"Infinite Optimism: Friedrich J. Bertuch's Pioneering Translation (1775-77) of Don Quixote"

Bonnie A. Speck - History
"Minor Courts and Legal Culture at the Frontier"

2004-2005

Kelly Young - Communication
"A Hunt for Identity and Sovereignty: A Rhetorical Analysis of Makah Indian Discourse in the Quest to Regain Whaling Rights"
Guided by Dr. William Trapani

Tara Hayes - English
"Jonson's Women, Women's Jonson"
Guided by Dr. Arthur F. Marotti

Derrick Willis - Anthropology
"Coming of Age Among African American Men in Detroit"
Guided by Dr. Andrea Sankar

Doris Runey - English
"Lonei Teodorani's Lorelei: A Praxis in Translation and Film Adaption"
Guided by Dr. Anca Vlasopolos

Tamara Emerson - English
"Translational Troubles: Moral Networks as Creating Nation in Nineteenth Century U.S. Imaginings of China"
Guided by Dr. Richard Grusin

2003-2004

Susan Lynne Beckwith - English
"Fractured Voices, Failing Bodies, and the Art of Narratives: Tracing the Self and Other in Narrative Form and Function from the Victorians to Today"

Carolyn Psenka - Anthropology
"Semantic Drift and Complex Organizations: Appropriation and Translation of Text in Engineering Networks"

Stephanie Hall-Sturgis - English
"Does Community-Based Pedagogy Foster Critical Consciousness?"

Jennifer Tatsak-Danyliw, Communication
"The 'Great Good Place' for Some People: A Rhetorical Criticism of Starbucks Coffee Company"