Introducing Our New Graduate Fellows (and Welcoming Back Our Senior Fellow)
We are thrilled to introduce two doctoral students who joined our team this fall as Graduate Writing Fellows. This fellowship is awarded every year by The Writing Center to graduate students who demonstrate excellent writing, communication, and interpersonal skills. Throughout the year, fellows receive training and experience in the pedagogy of one-on-one writing instruction, learn about effective writing workshop design and execution, and have the chance to design and deliver their own workshops. All the while, The Writing Center supports the fellows’ dissertation-writing process through individual and group writing support.
Our newest fellows are:
Emma Merrigan is a PhD student in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Her dissertation, “Cripping Utopia: Revolutionary Corporeality in Cuba and the Diaspora,” explores representations of disability and illness in 20th– and 21st-century Cuban and Diasporic cultural production. Her focus is on representations of disability and illness in the Cuban Revolution, and her interdisciplinary framework encompasses disability studies, queer theory, critical race theory, and Latin American cultural studies. From 2012 to 2015, she served as a writing consultant for both English and Spanish-language projects at Truman State University’s Writing Center, where she worked with students for four hours a week on all sorts of pieces.
Meredith Kelling is a PhD student in the Department of English. Her dissertation focuses on the constraints shaping written work in 20th-century American culture, particularly with respect to race, gender, and class. Meredith researches textual depictions of domestic, racialized, and feminized labors in literature as well as in memoir, cookbooks, and other texts. Meredith has been an American Culture Studies graduate fellow for the last four years, and she has also taught writing courses at UMSL and Washington University in St. Louis.
In addition, one of our former Graduate Fellows, Lindsay Sheedy, has returned as our Senior Graduate Fellow. Lindsay is a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Her dissertation examines the cultural, religious, and artistic exchanges between Spain and Southern Italy during the early modern period through the lens of painted religious sculpture. In her role as Senior Graduate Fellow, Lindsay will take on more administrative responsibilities while also mentoring our newest fellows.