Middlebury Awards Kellogg Fellowships to Five Students
Five Middlebury College students have been named recipients of Kellogg Fellowships to pursue research in the humanities. Fellows receive $5,000 to support travel and research expenses over the summer and coming year.
“The Kellogg Fellowship offers students in the humanities an amazing opportunity to pursue in-depth senior work,” said Lisa Gates, associate dean for fellowships and research. “With this generous financial support, seniors are able to travel, conduct field work, attend conferences, immerse themselves in artistic production. The fellowship permits a depth of engagement that results in outstanding work.”
Following is a list of this year’s Fellows with descriptions of their projects:
Sade Awodesu ’25, who is majoring in history and Arabic, will research two youth protest movements—the March 23 Uprising in Morocco of 1965 that advocated for the right to higher education and the February First Movement at Princeton University in 1974 which fought for racial and educational equality. “I believe mapping these two histories onto one another will reveal a more complete picture of the New Left and their methods in a global context,” wrote Awodesu, who plans to make three research trips over the summer and coming year. For her project titled “Harakat 23 Mars and the February First Movement: A bi-national case study of Memory and the New Left, 1970-1977,” Awodesu is working with advisor Dima Ayoub, associate professor of Arabic.
Natasha Deen ’25, an English major with a minor in history, is working on a research project titled, “Finding Ourselves: Women’s Voices in 20th Century Irish Short Fiction” which seeks to examine the representation of female characters in the short stories of Edna O’Brien and Mary Lavin. For her field work, Deen will primarily spend time in Counties Dublin, Clare, and Meath in Ireland. “I was immediately drawn into stories written by Edna O’Brien and Mary Lavin, two women who uniquely participate in and explore Irish women’s lives in rural and urban settings,” wrote Deen. “Their stories are deeply involved in the development of their characters, specifically in exploring women’s struggles in and out of the rural countryside during the first decades of the Irish Free State.” Deen will be working with advisor Benjamin Graves, assistant professor of English.
Yang Liu ’25, a history and philosophy major, is working on a project titled, “The Evolving Social Status of Keqing (客卿) in the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420 - 589 A.D.).” Liu plans to conduct a historical investigation and a genealogical analysis of the social status of Keqing in Imperial Chinese history, specifically focusing on the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, which spanned approximately from 420 to 589 C.E. “If one were to understand China both in terms of its history and its present, he/she must understand how the class of scholar-officials came into existence during the Han Dynasty, and one of the prototypes or historical predecessors of the scholar-officials is the group of Keqing,” wrote Liu. He will be working with advisor Don Wyatt, professor of history.
Kaela Loftus ’24.5, an English major, is working on a project titled, “There’s Silence Here: Angolan Storytelling and Decentering Western Perspectives” which focuses on what has been lost through colonization, and on researching Angolan history from non-Western perspectives. “As an Angolan-American writer and scholar, I am heavily invested in writing about Angola, particularly through the stories and lived experiences of my mother who lived through the Angolan civil war and the legacy of Portuguese imperialism, which has led to the massive loss of Angolan art, history, and lives,” writes Loftus, who is working with advisor Spring Ulmer, visiting assistant professor of English.
Ryan McElroy ’25, a history major with a minor in history of art and architecture, is working on a project titled, “The Ottoman “Other”: Tracing Trans-Imperial Exchanges in Venice and Northern Italy, 1500-1700” which investigates migration of transimperial subjects between two hostile yet symbiotic societies, the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. “My research aims to bring stories from the margins — the folklore behind remote Italian-Turkish towns, the records of Ottoman-Venetian exchanges, visual representations of “Turks” in Renaissance Italy — into the forefront of historical inquiry,” wrote McElroy, who will be working with advisor Febe Armanios, professor of history.
The Kellogg Fellowship is administered by Middlebury College through its Undergraduate Research office. A selection committee composed of the dean for faculty research and development, the associate dean for fellowships and research, and faculty members drawn from different disciplines reviews student applications and selects fellows each spring. For more information, visit the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research.