Franke Fellows 2024-2025
Franke Graduate Fellows
Franke Graduate Fellowships, supported by generous funding from Richard and Barbara Franke and The Graduate School (TGS), bring together four outstanding doctoral students in the humanities to cultivate their research and teaching in the interdisciplinary setting of the Kaplan Institute. Franke Graduate Fellows devote two quarters, full time, to shaping their projects during fall and winter. They also receive pedagogical mentoring in developing an undergraduate course that they teach in their home departments in the spring, and present their research at the Future Directions Forum in spring 2025.
Mariana Gutierrez Lowe
Department of English; Gender and Sexuality Studies Certificate
Project: Maternal Ruptures: Motherwork and Embodiment in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
"My dissertation examines 20th and 21st century Indigenous and Latinx novels and poetry collections and their representations of motherhood. I argue that family separations and the severing of maternal relationships at the U.S.-Mexico border are caused by border policy, which calls for and builds infrastructure like the border wall, border fences, freeways, and other surveillant technologies aimed at disrupting familial and maternal relationships for Latinx and Indigenous peoples."
Govind Narayan Ponnuchamy
Department of English
Project: Inheriting Energy: Victorian Literature and the Thermodynamics of India's Developmentalism
Comparing Victorian novels with contemporary Indian Anglophone literature, Inheriting Energy explores residues of the British Empire's energy logics as they appear in postcolonial India's national imagination. How have energy’s literary and political manifestations modeled thinking about empire and race in the nineteenth century, and how does it continue to give us ways of thinking about nationhood and power? To answer these questions, this project traces the British empire's scientific and epistemological continuity through the ongoing ways in which Postcolonial India uses, imagines, and writes about energy.
Mustafa Siddiqui
Department of Black Studies
Project: Trans Synthetics: Black Immaterial Praxis and the Politics of Gender Authenticity
Examining politics of authenticity within trans material cultures/cultural phenomena, this project aims to develop a theory of trans immateriality, a racialized-gender analysis that disrupts normative representations of objects and materials relevant to Black trans cultures and bodily politics. Traversing cultural phenomena relating to the body, aesthetic extensions of the body, and sonic/visual representations of bodily politics, this project embarks on an epistemological reimagining of how we come to know the (racialized gendered) body.
Kylie Walters
Department of Radio/TV/Film; Screen Cultures Program; Certificate in Critical Theory
Project: Designs for Refinement: Oil and Architectural Form in Postwar Visual Culture
"My dissertation is a media theoretical and media historical approach to the architecture of U.S.-based oil corporations from the postwar era through the 1973-1974 oil crisis, as oil moved toward competitive globalization and as television and modernism became strategically central. Traversing art and documentary photography, graphic and industrial design, print media, television, and film, the project both situates architectural forms for oil within a broader media history and theorizes architecture as a form of media."
FRANKE underGRADUATE FELLOWS
Franke Undergraduate Fellows develop their independent research projects within the Kaplan Institute; receive mentorship in fall and winter through the Senior Humanities Seminar, taught by Kalyan Nadiminti (Assistant Professor of English); and present their work at the Future Directions Forum in spring 2025.
Anna Dellit
Departments of Black Studies and Legal Studies
Project: Manufacturing Blackness: State Facilitated Vietnamese Refugee Conceptions of Blackness, 1975-1990
"Amidst the influx of Vietnamese refugees coming to the United States in the late 1970s, resettlement programs situated many families in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Through researching archival records in West Philadelphia and San Francisco, my research hopes to investigate how US policy concerning Vietnamese refugee resettlement, education, and citizenship encourages an assimilationist trajectory and influences their conceptions of Blackness and Civil Rights protest."
Diana Deng
Comparative Literary Studies Program and Departments of Radio/Television/Film and Mathematics
Project: Between China, Chile, and South Africa: A Creative Collaboration in Poetry
"My project focuses on three poetry collections written during diplomatic visits sponsored by China’s Maoist cultural diplomacy program in the long 60s: Chinese poet Ai Qing’s Upon the Cape, Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha’s China Roja, and South African poet Dennis Brutus’s China Poems. I hope to investigate the interplay of politics and poetics in these poetry collections that helped to create an imaginative alliance in the Global South during the Cold War era."
Caroline Drapeau
Departments of English and Theatre
Project: Creaturely Characters: Domesticated Animals in the Victorian Novel
"In my investigation of representations of domesticated animals in Victorian literature, I examine the realist novel’s contribution to the epistemological dis-animation of nonhuman animals in Victorian culture, whereby domesticated animals became tools, both literal and literary, for human use. Contextualizing a close reading of Victorian novels in political, philosophical, and cultural discourses surrounding domesticated animals, this project explores what was possible to think about animals in the nineteenth century and strives to center nonhuman animals as subjects worthy of critical inquiry, rather than as allegories for human themes."