Five talented doctoral students in the humanities at UNM will receive 2014  Russell J. and Dorothy S.Bilinksi Dissertation Fellowships thanks to a generous gift from the Bilinski Educational Foundation:

• Rebecca Ellis (History)
• Mary Henderson (Spanish & Portuguese)
• Rachel Spaulding (Spanish & Portuguese)
• Nicholas Schwarz (English)
• Gino Signoracci (Philosophy)

Their dissertations explore, respectively: early schools for the blind and politicized categories of disability in Argentina; preserving elementary school children’s loyalty to home community Spanish while enabling selective use of school English; the crafted mystical identities of three women slaves of African descent in colonial Peru, Brazil and Spain; history in the 11th-century writings of the Archbishop Wulfstan of York; and G. W. F. Hegel’s problematic account of Indian philosophy. 

Alternates Rachel Levitt and Melanie Yazzie (American Studies) and Stephanie Spong (English) are also to be commended for their outstanding dissertation projects.

You can read more about the 2014 recipients here.