Lydia Abedeen’s (3rd-year MFA+MA) poetry was published in The Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s magazine The Margins: the Love Letters. Another of her poems, “[the zuihitsu considers the consequences of survival: an exercise in obfuscation]” was published in issue 24.1 of Mizna this past summer. Lydia attended The Watering Hole writers’ retreat last December, and conducted independent research in the spring at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.
Some of George Abraham’s (3rd-year MFA+MA) poems were published this year in Poetry Magazine and Poetry London, and other pieces appeared in various folios on ecopoetry and love poetry with The Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s magazine The Margins. Their work was also recently anthologized in Infinite Constellations: an Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (University of Alabama Press) and Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems (Orison Books), and they were commissioned to produce a visual poem by the CUE Art Foundation, as part of a recent Queer Arab art exhibit A Thought Is A Memory. They also edited Mizna’s issue 24.1 on Myth and Memory, which featured an interview they conducted over the summer on Queer Palestinian folklore with Sarah Cypher as part of their MA thesis work. They attended a critical theory intensive with the Beirut Institute of Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) at the American University of Beirut over the summer.
Rio Bergh (PhD candidate) was awarded the 2023 Lawrence Lipking Fellowship at the Newberry Library, where he has spent the last two quarters engaged in archival research for his dissertation.
“A Still Life,” an essay by Andrea Bianchi (2nd year MFA+MA), was awarded the Hunger Mountain 2023 Creative Nonfiction Prize. Andrea was also a finalist for the Passages North 2023 Ray Ventre Memorial Creative Nonfiction Prize, and one of her essays was recently chosen by New Ohio Review as a 2023 Best of the Net nominee. She recently published nonfiction in New South, and participated as a nonfiction contributor in the 2023 Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont this past summer.
An article by Kai Chase (PhD candidate), “Growing Solidarity in Weelaunee,” was published in Rampant Magazine in March. They assisted with the Summer Research Opportunity Program at Northwestern, providing assistance and guidance for marginalized undergraduate students looking to go to Northwestern for graduate school. Kai conducted research training as well as offering regular mentoring and conversations about what to expect in graduate school.
Jen Comerford (PhD candidate) received the 2023 International Visitor Fellowship from the Jane Austen Society of North America, an award that allowed her to spend six weeks over this past summer in Chawton, England where she conducted research in the women’s writing collection at Chawton House and the museum collection at Jane Austen’s House.
This summer, a review by Michaela Corning-Myers (4th-year PhD) of Anna Pochmara’s The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel was published in Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 17, no. 1.
Sam English (PhD candidate) was one of the recipients of our department’s 2022-23 Award for Excellence as a Teaching Assistant.
Allie Gibeily (PhD candidate) organized and co-chaired a seminar entitled “Anticolonial Poetics in Form and Performance” at the 2023 American Comparative Literature Association’s conference, and chaired a panel entitled “Public Humanities in Eighteenth-Century Studies” at the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in the same month. She will chair the Graduate and Early Career Caucus for the latter organization over the coming year.
During the last two weeks of June, Allie attended a seminar on critical theory and psychoanalysis at the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research. The rest of her summer was spent conducting preliminary dissertation research at archives in England, Lebanon, Germany, and Turkey. She will spend the Winter and Spring Quarters of 2024 at the Qasid Arabic Institute in Amman, Jordan thanks to a CASA II Fellowship awarded by the Center for Arabic Study Abroad. The fellowship is designed to provide doctoral students with a mix of immersive language training and research opportunities related specifically to their projects, while also allowing them to network with regional scholars.
Mariana Gutierrez-Lowe (PhD candidate) received a Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Fellowship to consult Leslie Silko’s Papers at the Beinecke Library this past summer.
In March 2023, Paulina Jones-Torregrosa (PhD candidate) was named a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellow in Women’s Studies. Paulina also earned Northwestern’s Presidential Fellowship for 2023-25, as well as membership in the Northwestern Society of Fellows.
Mitchell Johnson (2nd-year MFA+MA) published a brief essay entitled “My Curtains, My Radiator” in The Paris Review Daily, and has an essay forthcoming this winter, about addiction and harm reduction, in n+1. This summer he attended a residency at Art Farm Nebraska.
Irene Kim (PhD candidate) was one of the principal organizers of the March 2023 Post45 Graduate Symposium, which met at the University of Washington in Seattle. She also won a 2023-24 Graduate Fellowship from the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies at Northwestern.
Ryan Nhu (3rd-year PhD) was one of the recipients of our department’s 2022-23 Award for Excellence as a Teaching Assistant.
Under the auspices of a Summer Research Grant awarded by the Sexualities Project at Northwestern, Angad Singh (3rd-year PhD) engaged in archival work in New York and Connecticut, looking at the archives of some 20th century thinkers central to the fields of postcolonialism and queer studies.
In June it was announced that S Yarberry’s (PhD candidate) book, A Boy in the City, won the 2022 Foreword INDIES award for Poetry. In July, they joined an international group of students and scholars in London for the nine-day T. S. Eliot International Summer School. Over the course of the past year, S has had poems published from their new project, “The Robert Poems,” in Guernica, Gulf Coast, The Dialogist, Another Chicago Magazine, Sequestrum, and Paperbag. A short article “Desire, Joy, and Sadness in Spinoza’s P18” can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, and their chapbook, To Seem the Stranger, is available now from Bottlecap Press. S is now serving as co-chair of the Trans & Queer Caucus for the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS).
At the ACLA conference in March, Sreddy Yen (PhD candidate) co-organized a seminar titled “What Has (African) Literature Got to Do With It?” At the 2023 African Literature Association Conference, Sreddy was an invited respondent at the roundtable on Lindsey Green-Simms’s Queer African Cinema. In fall 2023, Sreddy worked as a graduate assistant in the Northwestern Prison Education Program.