Graduate Fellows

“The Graduate Fellows program fosters an environment that cultivates genuine friendship based on intellectual curiosity and academic rigor.” — Dong Hwan (Alex) Chun Ph. D. candidate in English and Graduate Fellow of the Nanovic Institute

LEFT TO RIGHT: Alec Hahus, Moritz Graefrath, Clare O’Hare, Dong Hwan (Alex) Chun, with Associate Professor of Classics Hildegund Müller, senior liaison for research and curricular affairs.

for Graduate Fellows Across Disciplines

BY HILDEGUND MÜLLER

The 2019-20 graduate fellow cohort (left to right): Anna Vincenzi, Alec Hahus, Moritz Graefrath, Jacob Coen, Shinjini Chattopadhyay, and Clare O’Hare. Graduate students have been part of the Nanovic family for many years. Since the late 1990s, graduate students have had access to research funding and, since 2005, select opportunities for Dissertation Fellowships that allow Ph.D. candidates in their final stage to focus entirely on writing for a full year. Specific programs to facilitate graduate students’ participation in the Institute’s work and scholarly community have only recently been established.

Established in 2019, the Nanovic Graduate Fellows program aims at building human connections in an interdisciplinary field, bringing together students who share a common interest in European studies but who otherwise might never have come together in an intellectual community. Nanovic Graduate Fellows are typically Ph.D. students whose research interests focus on European politics, history, or culture. They come from such diverse fields as political science, medieval and modern history, European languages and literatures, theology, law, and philosophy. The group has also included students from the Master of Global Affairs program housed at the Keough School of Global Affairs.

The program provides its fellows, first and foremost, with an intellectual community, a group of peers in European studies as well as access to the wider community of faculty fellows and visiting scholars engaged with Nanovic. The small cohort of roughly a dozen students annually, at a variety of stages of their post-graduate programs, meet regularly and mostly do what graduate students are best at: embark on lively discussions, peer-review each other relentlessly, and scrutinize the state of the field of European studies and the methodical and ethical questions it engenders. According to Graduate Fellow Dong Hwan (Alex) Chun, “the Graduate Fellows program fosters an environment that cultivates genuine friendship based on intellectual curiosity and academic rigor. It provides an interdisciplinary space where scholars are encouraged to freely share and discuss their reading of the past, present, and future.”

Fortunately, this intense intellectual exchange happens in an atmosphere of good cheer and mutual benevolence; fellows also enjoy each others’ company over a beer at the Crooked Ewe or at a backyard cookout. During the darkest times of the pandemic, when in-person meetings were impossible, we organized winter walks around the lakes on campus, enjoying the sunshine and tempering the icy winter air with hot coffees and chocolates.

The Graduate Fellows program places great importance on professionalization, in ways that bring students into a community of intellectual peers and mentors. The students introduce and facilitate the popular lunchtime faculty fellow lecture series, socialize with invited speakers, and present their own research in a public setting. The program also facilitates opportunities for teaching in the European studies curriculum, which is indispensable to a graduate student’s resume as they prepare to enter a competitive job market and allows them to, in turn, become intellectual mentors to undergraduates.

These activities are just some of the ways in which graduate students enrich and benefit from Nanovic’s intellectual community, and the Institute welcomes their creative input. Their interests span from political theory, security, and international relations to the arts, from Milton and Cervantes to Joyce and the cinematic oeuvre of Fellini: anything is welcome that provides for interesting experiences for young scholars and adds new facets to Nanovic’s research and teaching profile.

Samuel Roberts, a Ph.D. student in history, summarizes his experience: “The Graduate Fellows program has allowed me to meet and learn from fellow scholars whom I might not have known otherwise. Our fellowship has not only better informed me about contemporary European issues, but also given me new ways to think about my research.” ◆