Assistant professor, alumnus receive Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowships

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Marlene Daut, assistant professor of English and cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University (CGU), and CGU alumnus Oscar Jimenez-Castellanos, assistant professor at Arizona State University, were awarded prestigious Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowships. The fellowship is awarded to post-doctoral researchers who demonstrate academic achievement and are committed to future careers of teaching at the university level.

Marlene Daut

Through the Ford Fellowship—which aims to increase diversity in universities nationwide through a diverse faculty—recipients will be given the chance to work with other academics in their field at a host institution to complete their proposed project.

With the fellowship, Daut will be finishing her book, Science of Desire: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, which will be the only literary history of the Haitian revolution. She will travel to Duke University in fall 2013, where she will work with Laurent Dubois, professor of romance studies and history, and Deborah Jenson, director of undergraduate studies and professor of romance studies, in their Haiti Lab. Based on the model of scientific laboratories, students and scholars will collaborate together in this space as they work on different aspects of Haiti—from language to history to anthropology.

Daut will also start a second book project with her Ford Fellowship. A title is forthcoming, but she plans for it to be an intellectual history through cosmopolitanism. She will engage early Haitian scholarship with more contemporary scholars, and trace the conversation between Haitians and the rest of the world during and after the Haitian revolution.

“The majority of the histories that have dealt with the Haitian revolution don’t really include Haitian writers, so it almost becomes a situation where you’re talking about a place, and you’re talking about a people, but none of those people are included in the conversation,” Daut said. With her research and writing, she aims to fill this gap. “It’s up to us scholars to write those figures back into the history that they are already a part of.”

Jimenez-Castellanos, who received his PhD in 2008 from the School of Educational Studies, will be working at the University of South Florida at Miami with Anthony Rolle, chair and associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies. Jimenez-Castellanos’s work will focus on how public funds are allocated in education. With his research, he aims to determine the efficiency of Arizona’s K-12 public school system, ultimately hoping to develop a system that will improve students’ academic outcomes.

As a university that promotes both diversity and transdisciplinarity, the Ford Fellowship is a good fit for CGU professors and alumni alike.

“I think showing that here at CGU we’re doing that transdisciplinary work, but also work that’s engaged with scholars in other universities. That can only be a positive for us,” said Daut.

Jimenez-Castellanos said CGU was integral in his preparation for not only the Ford Fellowship, but his academic career as a whole. “Claremont Graduate University was instrumental in providing me the knowledge base, research skills, and mentorship that has guided my career in academia,” he said. “There is no better institution to nurture and develop future tenure-track faculty than CGU.”