Graduate Student Fellow Reflection

MARISOL FILA

A deepened commitment to engaged and public scholarship

2021-22 A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI GRADUATE FELLOW reflection

Being a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities was one of the most rewarding and enriching experiences I have had as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Former graduate fellows had already highly praised their time in residence at the institute, but I never imagined that it would be such a fulfilling year. Since my first year in the PhD program back in 2015, the Institute for the Humanities has been a space that I have sought to inhabit, connect with, and contribute to.

I have always found their lectures, exhibits, artists in residence, and overall events in close dialogue with my scholarship and the way I approach my research and work within and beyond academia. If the Institute for the Humanities was to me an example of interdisciplinarity, my time as a fellow was a reaffirmation of it. I learned so much from each and every one of the seminars, the works in progress of faculty and graduate student fellows, their feedback, critical thoughts, and inspiring suggestions and connections. Coming from a diverse range of humanistic fields, the cohort itself was an example of interdisciplinary. At first, I felt intimidated by thinking about reading and having to give feedback to work from fields that I had been rarely exposed to, but the seminars proved to me that it is through that type of challenge that new perspectives, questions, and ways of seeing and understanding humanities work arise. Despite the challenges that the pandemic brought to our in-person interactions, I benefited and learned so much from conversations with other fellows, and the generous and insightful feedback that faculty fellows offered me. I strive for creating a scholarship that can be accessible, translatable to multiple audiences, and produces knowledge in collaboration with academic and non-academic actors, and my time at the institute and the learnings from fellows and their work have strengthened and deepened my commitment to an engaged and public scholarship. The environment of the institute, together with the possibility of accompanying the work in progress of artists in residence, of seeing their exhibitions materialized—additionally contributed to my learning and growth as a scholar. I am deeply grateful to all the staff and scholars that inhabit and make possible the institute. I am grateful to all the fellows with whom I spent this year in residence. I am definitely fulfilled by this experience and excited about the future that I can build as an engaged scholar.

—Marisol Fila is a PhD student in Romance languages and literatures