Phyllis Rackin Fellowship for Feminist Scholarship in the Humanities was created in 2008 in honor of Phyllis Rackin, a pioneering feminist scholar and former faculty member in the English Department here at Penn. The fellowship provides up to $3,000 in summer research or travel funding to doctoral student(s)  in theSchool of Arts and Sciences whose research creates or promotes new scholarship on women, gender, and/or sexuality in the humanities. The 2011 recipients are:

1. Melanie Adley (Germanic Languages and Literatures) The Rackin Fellowship will fund Ms. Adley’s travel to and lodging in Vienna and Berlin where she will be conducting archival research for her efforts to bring to light literary moments of resistance of the femme fragile in fin de siècle Viennese literature. Adley’s scholarship will undoubtedly contribute a new feminist analysis to the study of Germanic literature from the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
2. Claire Taylor Jones (Comparative Literature)  The Rackin Fellowship will fund the reproduction costs for some of the archived documents Ms. Jones needs to procure for her research. Jones is looking at the ways in which women exercised control over their bodies, communities, and reform by examining the “sister-books,” Meyer’s “Book of Offices,” the shorter narratives from reformed Dominican convents, and the hymnal in Freiburg im Breisgau. Jones’ research will undoubtedly contribute to a new feminist understanding of the lives of these nuns from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
3. Melanie Micir (English)  The Rackin Fellowship will fund Ms. Micir’s trip to Toronto to study the Vera Brittain Archive at McMaster University. Micir’s research promises to highlight the activism of queer women via their biographical practices in mid-20th century Britain. Her scholarship will undoubtedly contribute a new feminist understanding of how these modern British women negotiated sexual politics and personal identities.