2015 Bilinski Cohort Announcements

2015 Bilinski

Posted: May 4, 2015

With its second gift of $400,000 since 2013, the Bilinski Educational Foundation will continue to recognize excellent doctoral students in the humanities at UNM. Eight doctoral students have already completed their dissertations and degrees supported by Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowships. The 2015 recipients for the Bilinski Fellowship stand out for their potential impact on both scholarship and community. Melvatha Chee (Linguistics) is analyzing how children learn to speak Navajo by building out "chunks" of language from the Navajo verb. Rachel Levitt (American Studies) is investigating how the public attention to bullying has, as its flip side, created a dangerous definition of some LGBT youth as "bullied subjects." Carson Morris (History) is examining how biological and transgender women participated in beauty culture, sexual performance and sexual commerce in Chile as political regimes changed between 1950 and 1990. Corinne Occhino-Kehoe (Linguistics) is questioning standard linguistic arguments about the arbitrariness of the sign with her study of the "iconicity"of sign language. Stephanie Spong (English) is reexamining Modernist poetry to reveal how poets from Gertrude Stein to Langston Hughes created new and influential ideas of love and eros.