Beginning in 2019, The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere — with the support of the Director Barbara Mennel’s Waldo W. Neikirk Professorship — supports Ph.D. students in UF’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for intensive one-week themed residencies and institutes at the National Humanities Center that focus on practical teaching, research, and professionalization skills.
Summer 2024
National Humanities Center Ph.D. Student Summer Residency: Becoming a Modern Scholar
Anwesha Chattopadhyay (Ph.D. Candidate, English)
Anwesha Chattopadhyay is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English and works in the intersections of postcolonialism, decolonialism, rhetoric, media, and technology. Her dissertation is on the “Postcolonial Subversion of Language Learning Technologies in West Bengal, India”. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from The University of Calcutta, and Master of Arts from the University of Florida and Jadavpur University. From 2016-2019 she worked in the Bengali and Hindi television industries and has been credited on five shows. She hopes that the NHC summer residency will hone her pedagogy and ability to navigate contemporary academia and the workplace.
María Victoria Muñoz (Ph.D. Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese Studies)
María Victoria Muñoz is a 3rd-year doctoral candidate studying Southern-cone literature from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective. She researches the once-erased (19th-century) female characters in Argentinian literature and how contemporary writings and movies reinterpret and correct that initial erasure in their new representations. She is also bringing into the conversation a poem from the beginning of the 20th century that has not been studied and that offers a valuable bridge between the 19th and 21st centuries. The NHC residency will provide the space for interdisciplinary collaborations that will bring both depth and innovative ideas to the teaching and professional materials that will inform her early-career steps. The residency will also leverage the ability to plan a broader horizon of possibilities using valuable skills and media to meet future opportunities both in and out of academia.