Graduate Student Placements and Awards

Students from the division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies have been marking significant achievements on the job market and in fellowship competitions throughout the year. Here are highlights from current students and recent graduates.

Graduate Student Job Placement

• Sharada Balachandran Orihuela (English, PhD 2012) has accepted a tenure-track job as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she will hold a joint appointment in the English Department and the Comparative Literature Program.
• Toby Beauchamp (Cultural Studies, PhD 2010) completes his Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC San Diego and moves this summer to a tenure-track Assistant Professorship at Oklahoma State University in Gender and Women's Studies
• Hilary Bryan (Performance Studies) has a senior lectureship in Critical Studies at California College of the Arts for spring semester 2012.
• Gina Caison (English, PhD 2012) has accepted a tenure-track job in 20th/21st-Century Southern literature at Georgia State University.
• Barbara Ceptus (Cultural Studies, PhD 2011) was awarded a Public Fellows fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies through which she is working as the Leadership Development Officer at the Council on Foundations.
• Brian Davisson (Comparative Literature, PhD 2011) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University.
• Ryan Fong (English, PhD 2012) has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
• Betsy Gilliland (Education, DE in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies and Second Language Acquisition) has accepted a tenure track position at the University of Hawai’i. In the fall, she will assume the position of Assistant Professor of Second Language Education in the Department of Second Language Studies.
• Andrew Hageman (English, PhD 2011) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, following a one-year postdoctoral fellowship.
• Judy Halebsky (Performance Studies, PhD 2009) is an Assistant Professor at Dominican University, San Rafael, California. 
• Dawn Lee (Cultural Studies, PhD 2012) began working this fall as Director of Cultural Centers at the University of San Francisco.
• Kara Miller (Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Hawai’i Manoa.
• Liz Montegary (Cultural Studies, PhD 2011) is completing a Visiting Lectureship at Yale University and has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professorship in the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University
• Jorge Morejon (Performance Studies, PhD 2009) is a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Department of Creative and Festival Arts, Trinidad and Tobago.
• Kyle Pivetti (English, PhD 2010) will be starting in the fall as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 17th and 18th century literature at Norwich University in Vermont.  
• Fei Shi (Comparative Literature)  has accepted a position as Tutor, which is equivalent to Assistant Professor, at Quest University, Canada
• Nitza Tenenblat  (Performance Studies, PhD 2010) has a tenure-track position at the University of Brasilia in Brazil.
• Kristen Kennedy Terry (French, PhD expected 2012) has accepted a 3-year, renewable position as Professor of Practice at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Graduate Student Award and Fellowships

• Sylvie Bissonnette (Performance Studies) has received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture in Québec, Canada. 
• Cecilio Cooper (Performance Studies) has received a graduate research award from the National Transgender Library and Archives at the University of Michigan and the Black Queer Studies Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.
• William Cooper (Music) won the Leo Kaplan Award-the top prize-in the 2012 Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, given out by The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).
• Jess Curtis (Performance Studies) won a 2011 Alpert foundation award for Choreography.
• Ryan Fong (English) was selected to attend the 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, entitled “Oscar Wilde and His Circle.”
• Keith Hennessy (Performance Studies) won a National Dance Project/New England Foundation for the Arts award for Turbulence.
• Jinni Pradhan (Cultural Studies) has earned a $7500 US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies scholarship to study this summer at Cornell University's Summer Nepali Language program.
• Austin Smith (English, MFA 2009) has received a two-year Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.
• Jee-Eun Song (Cultural Studies, PhD expected 2012) has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Korea Foundation, through which she will be a visiting scholar next year (2012-13) at UC Berkeley's Center for Korean Studies.
• Nick Valvo (English) has been awarded a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
• Barbara Zimbalist’s (English) essay, "Performing Sacred Speech in the Visioenenboek of Hadewijch of Brabant," received the Graduate Student Essay Prize from the Medieval Academy of America.