Each year, the Kaneb Pre-doctoral Fellowship Program provides up to four advanced graduate students from the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters with a mentored experience of research and teaching at a prominent liberal arts college or research university. To date, 16 graduate students have participated in this fellowship program.
“The fellowship gives our students the opportunity to teach and conduct research at another top-notch institution,” said Barbara Turpin, associate dean of the Graduate School and Pre-doctoral Fellowship committee member. “They gain the experience of being mentored by another leading scholar in their field, and they are able to broaden their teaching portfolio.”
This year, Maria Arenillas, Courtney Luckhardt and John Hess are being hosted by the University of California-Davis, University of Glasgow and Harvard University, respectively. These students are engaging in research related to their thesis and teaching a course at the host institution under the guidance of the mentor. For example, Arenillas is co-teaching a seminar titled “Chile and Argentina since 1960: Politics, Aesthetics, and Memories” with Michael Lazzara, one of the most distinguished scholars in her field.
“The Pre-doctoral Fellowship has given me an amazing opportunity to broaden my intellectual horizons by supporting me while I teach in Britain and enabling me to pursue my research working with a renowned scholar in my field of medieval history,” Luckhardt said.
According to Hess, “during my teaching preparation semester I have conducted archival research in Yale’s American Literature Collection at the Beinecke Library, and I’ve been able to meet one of the novelists central to my dissertation. These experiences have been invaluable to my development as both a teacher and a scholar.”
Fellows are competitively selected by a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Committee, comprised of staff and faculty, that reviews all applications, invites finalists for interviews and makes final selections. The fellowship is co-sponsored by the Graduate School, the College of Arts and Letters, and the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning.
The John A. Kaneb Center, founded in 1995, stimulates reflection about—and advocates for the enhancement of—practices, policies and structures related to teaching and learning.
Contact: Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, kaneb@nd.edu, 574-631-9146
Originally published at newsinfo.nd.edu on February 05, 2010.