As Whiting Fellows, Doctoral Students Will Expand Areas of Research

Published: November 6, 2009

New Haven, Conn. — Eight graduate students in the humanities have won Whiting Fellowships, considered among the most prestigious student honors in the United States.

Funded by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, these fellowships are given to a small number of students at seven universities that have outstanding graduate programs in the humanities. At Yale, a faculty committee appointed by Dean Jon Butler selects the very best students from among those who have been nominated by their departments to be Whiting Fellows.

This year's Whiting Fellows are Mattia Acetoso (Italian language and literature), Eric Bianchi (music), Haydon Cherry (history), David Currell (English language and literature), Dan Gustafson (English language and literature), David Huyssen (history), Sebastian Lecourt (English language and literature) and Richard Suchenski (history of art, film studies).

The winners were honored at a dinner hosted by the dean in October and will meet several times during the spring semester to explore intellectual and professional issues that go beyond their dissertation topics. Robert Nelson, director of graduate studies in Renaissance studies and medieval studies, is serving as the coordinating faculty member.

"We will meet and get to know each other and explore common interests," says Nelson. "These will be thematic, not disciplinary — such as cultural memory, the sacred and the secular, literary and artistic genres, wealth and poverty, and performance. Next we will invite others to discuss some of these issues with us. My goal is to provide a stimulating intellectual environment for some of our finest graduate students as they move forward to the beginning of their professional careers."

The Whiting Foundation seeks to encourage students to address their role as humanists, "not merely as practitioners of specific disciplines," says Edward Barnaby, assistant dean and coordinator of the Whiting Fellowship program at Yale. "The Graduate School strongly endorses that approach.

"It is often noted that students in the humanities are vulnerable to feeling isolated because of the solitary nature of their research," he notes. "The Whiting Foundation's program counters this tendency and provides a rare and invigorating opportunity for students to reflect on and articulate what has shaped their own intellectual direction as humanists. Further, they are invited to consider as a group the professional responsibilities and challenges that humanists share, regardless of the specific disciplines in which they operate."

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