Funding Opportunities

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Past Awards/Fellows
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Awards

Jess Rafalko

Year: 2025

The 2025 CALS Summer Graduate Fellow was Jess Rafalko for her dissertation titled Grievance / Process: Forms of Labor in the Postwar American Novel, directed by Ben Schreier.

Eunice Toh

Year: 2024

Eunice Toh, for attendance at the 2024 Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

Andrew Erlandson

Year: 2024

Andrew Erlandson, for attendance at the 2024 Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

Michael Young

Year: 2023

The 2023 CALS Summer Graduate Fellow was Michael Young for his dissertation titled Twentieth Century Sophistries: Popular Science, Human Manuals, and American Rhetorical History, directed by Debbie Hawhee.

Aaron Montalvo

Year: 2023

Aaron Montalvo received the 2023 Dissertation Support Award for his dissertation titled Accounts of Exploitation and Stories of Sustainability: Narrating the Nature of Resources in the Modern American West, co-directed by Chris Reed and Christian Haines.

Sabrina Evans

Year: 2022

The 2022 CALS Summer Graduate Fellow was Sabrina Evans for her dissertation titled, Continuous Dignified Action: Black Clubwomen’s Literary, Intellectual, and Public Activism in Defense of Black Dignity, directed by Shirley Moody-Turner.

Katie Warczak

Year: 2022

Katie Warczak, Being Human: The Intersections of Animality, Race, Disability, and Eugenics in Modernist Literature (directed by Michael Bérubé and Keith Gilyard).

Justin Smith

Year: 2022

Justin Smith, for research at the Beinecke Library at Yale University

Justus Peña Berman

Year: 2021

The 2021 CALS Summer Graduate Fellow was Justus Peña Berman, for his dissertation titled Technoracialization: Race, Technology, and Media in Contemporary Latinx and Asian American Literature, directed by Tina Chen.

Aaren Pastor

Year: 2021

Aaren Pastor, Magicians Unbound: Modernism’s Counterhumanist Challenge to Man

kaleheadshot2_0

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Verna Kale, Associate Editor for The Letters of Ernest Hemingway and Associate Research Professor of English at Penn State, has been elected President of The Hemingway Society for the 2026-2028 term.

Congrats to Dr. Kale on this honor!

henryjames

Congratulations to Michael Anesko: Volume 19  of The Complete Letters of Henry James has received the MLA Approved Edition Seal. Well done, Michael!

Carmin Wong

On June 2, 2025, current doctoral student Carmin Wong was announced as the inaugural Poet Laureate of State College. In this position, Wong will serve the community by promoting the consumption and creation of poetry in State College.

Additionally, Wong was featured in the 2025 Shirley Graham Du Bois Creative-in-Residence. Her showcase, "Them Poems Along Won't Save Us' was featured online by the Academy of American Poets and broadcast on WBUR.

Working with Girls Write Now as a 2025 Teaching Artist, Carmin Wong, was interviewed by the organization she has been a part of for over ten years.

Congratulations, Carmin, on all of your accomplishments!

yolandamackeybarkers

Yolanda Mackey-Barkers has accepted a position as an assistant professor of African American Literature and Culture at Stony Brook University. She graduated in Spring 2025. Her dissertation is titled, "The Black Renaissance and the Radical Politics of Black Print Culture, 1915-1945" and was directed by Xiaoye You. Congratulations, Yolanda, on this job market success!

andrewerlandson

Andrew Erlandson, a past recipient of a CALS research seminar funding award, has accepted a tenure-track job offer from the English and Philosophy Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. Andrew’s dissertation, “Disabled Democracy: Figuring Disability in Earth Nineteenth-Century Literary and Political Discourses,” was directed by Chris Castiglia. Congratulations, Andrew, on the job market success!

Rebecca-Haddaway-Headshot-1536x2048

Rebecca Haddaway has accepted a tenure-track position in early American literature at Middle Tennessee State University. She graduated in Fall of 2023. Her research centers on abolition and medical discourse in early America and her dissertation was co-directed by Claire Colebrook and Carla Mulford. Congratulations, Rebecca, on this great job market success!

Murray Headshot
Courtney Murray Ross has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor in English at James Madison University. She graduated this spring with her PhD in English and African American Studies. Her research centers on Black women, reproduction, and space in nineteenth-century African-American literature and her dissertation was co-directed by Michael Bérubé and Gabrielle Foreman. Congratulations, Courtney, on this great job market success!