Dear Juniors,
Applications for the scholarship described below (you can find the full description on the COL web page under Grants) were due April 4th. Because of my recent illness, the application deadline has been extended to Friday, April 14th, midnight. Please e-mail all materials to me. If you are not working on a thesis that might qualify but know others who do, please inform them as well. Thank you, KT
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Candidates must be juniors enrolled full time at Wesleyan or a Wesleyan program overseas who plan to write an Honors thesis or its equivalent (a performance, an exhibit) in any Department of the Humanities and the Arts (Division I), the Social Sciences (Division II), or in interdisciplinary Programs that have a Humanities department as a participant. Any project proposal emanating from these departments may be considered at the discretion of the Committee, as long as the thesis deals with topics closely related to certain areas in which Professor Tölölyan has conducted his teaching and scholarship — diasporas, transnational formations and activities, and the implications of globalization for communities of dispersion.
Topics that exemplify but do not exhaust all possible cases include the study of:
Past and present events and processes that lead to dispersion and the subsequent creation of the social formations variously known as “diasporas,” “transnational communities” and “transnational social fields”;
All forms of past and contemporary cultural production by artists and scholars living and working in diasporic and transnational communities;
Representational practices of such diasporic communities in the spheres of social, religious, political and cultural life;
The effects of dispersion either on the homelands from which the new communities emigrate, or on the new societies and “host-lands” where they settle;
The trajectory, problems and effects of return migration by diasporas to homelands;
Discourses, practices, performances and institutions that motivate, organize, and perpetuate these diasporic formations, such as aesthetic and political ideology, whether deployed in high art, popular culture, social practices, or in forms of historiography and academic research;
Religious, social, educational, and political activities, ranging from lobbying and the creation of digital diasporic communities to the creation of NGOs that link diasporas to each other and the homeland, and to diasporic involvement in cross-border violence and conflicts.
An application consists of:
- A proposal for or description of a senior thesis, 1,000-1,500 words in length.
- An informal academic transcript.
- Two letters of recommendation from Wesleyan faculty, one of whom must be the probable supervisor of the Honors thesis. If the supervisor has not yet been determined, two letters from instructors familiar with the student’s work in fields relevant to the project will suffice.
The proposal should be e-mailed to Professor Tölölyan by midnight, April 14th, at ktololyan@wesleyan.edu. Supporting documents can be e-mailed to him there.
The decision is usually made within a week.