Research Support for Graduate Students

The English Department frequently supports graduate students' research through scholarships or travel funding. For example, the English Department provided the PhD students below with scholarships to support research for their dissertations.

2024-2025 Graduate Student Research Support

In fall 2024, Anna Kroon (PhD in English, Literature) received the English Department's PhD Research Funding Award to support a research trip to London archives. Her dissertation is about the relationship between chapbooks (cheaply made, single sheet books widely distributed to towns and villages via itinerant peddlers known as chapmen) and the new copyright laws in eighteenth-century England. She argues that chapbooks followed copyright law better than their traditional book trade counterparts by following copyright term limits and being the first to use the commons that emerged after those terms ended. Making an argument about eighteenth-century legal action and print culture required seeing the court documents and record books that are not digitized. For her research trip, she visited the National Archives, the British Library, Lambeth Palace Library, and the Guildhall Library. She was able to view massive parchment scrolls, hefty court record books, tiny chapbooks, and exciting first editions. Being able to see these records has helped to complicate and deepen her understanding of chapbooks' relationship to copyright. After this research trip, the argument of her dissertation radically changed because she was able to confidently say that chapbook producers were following the laws.

Receiving funding from the Department of English's Graduate Student Research Support Initiative in fall 2024 made it possible for Jacob Weston (PhD in Technical Communication and Rhetoric) to collect and analyze data for his dissertation, which investigates affect, assessment, and writing pedagogy education among graduate student instructors. The funds allowed him to compensate research participants for their time and to purchase necessary software for both quantitative and qualitative analysis, including Mplus and NVivo.