Graduate Student News

Congratulations to Dana Venerable who will be the Gender Institute’s Dissertation Fellow for 2020-2021. Her dissertation is titled “Collective Composition for Weathering Black Experience: Embodying Signature Moves of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Black Performance,” and it focuses on Black women’s performance, dance, and social choreography from Ntozake Shange and the Black Took Collective to Janelle Monáe. She is working with Ariel Nereson (advisor), Damien Keane, Myung Mi Kim, and Nicole Morris Johnson.

Dipanjan Maitra and Adam Mitts have been awarded Humanities Institute Advanced PhD Fellowships for 2020-2021. Dipanjan’s dissertation is titled “‘Built with Glue and Clippings’: Modernist Collaboration and the Press-Cutting Bureau,” while Adam’s dissertation is titled “In the Grain of Illness: AIDS Writing and Radical Politics.” 

Kinga Winnicka has been awarded the Stephanie Niciszewska Mucha Dissertation Fellowship in the College of Arts and Sciences for 2020-2021. Her dissertation is titled “Imagined Cityscapes: New Perspectives on Future Urbanization in Contemporary Science Fiction.”

Simon Eales, Hyoseol Ha, Travis Sharp, Jacob Sloan, Ryan Smith, and Meagan Wilson are the recipients of the Opler-Doubrava Fifth-Year Fellowships for 2020-2021.

Congratulations to Andrew Dorkin and Amanda McLaughlin on winning Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching Awards for 2019-2020.

Congratulations to Nicole Lowman, whose dissertation research, activism, and work in the community-based User Experience Lab have recently been celebrated in two ways. First, Nicole was selected as UB’s nominee for the Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award. A month later, at the Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (SIGDOC) conference, Nicole won the third-place award in a national research competition for her presentation, “Advising the Police Advisory Board: Toward a More Usable Technology.”

Matt Garite was promoted to Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of English at Wake Forest University, in Spring 2020.

Ajitpaul Mangat has accepted a Faculty Fellow position at Niagara University, a full-time and renewable 3-year position teaching composition and literature classes.

Guy Witzel was promoted to Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of English at Wake Forest University, in Fall 2020.

Jung Suk Hwang was hired as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Sung Kyung Kwan University (SKKU), in August 2019.

Chung-Hwan Joe was hired as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Hongik University.

Joshua Lam was promoted to Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, in Summer 2019.

Eonjoo Park began an Assistant Professorship teaching in her field of early-modern drama in the Department of English Literature at Jeonbuk National University, in Fall 2020.

Louis (Yu-Ching) Wu began an Assistant Professorship teaching in his field of medieval literature in the English Department of the national Central University, Taiwan.