Three stipends of $3000 each are awarded annually to support graduate student research in the humanities. Nominees are put forward by departments and must have reached the stage in their respective programs where they are expected to be undertaking research toward the completion of a thesis or dissertation. A call for Brown & Kruse Graduate Scholars will be available in the spring of 2008.

These grants are made possible by the generous gift of Maggie and Corey Brown '92 and of Gayle and Layne Kruse '73, members of the Glasscock Center Development Council.

Daniel Betti, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, will be studying Plato's political philosophy to provide a critical perspective on various strains of contemporal political theory about cosmopolitanism. He divides the modern revival of cospmopolitanism into two groups: universalist cosmopolitans, including moral, liberal, democratic, and patriotic cosmopolitans, and postmodern cosmopolitans in favor of the continuous hybridization of cultures and forms in the process of globalization. He then argues that against this two-pronged modern revival, Plato provides the counter-argument with a cosmopolitanism that truly attempts to harmonize the polis with the cosmos.

Richa Dhanju, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology, will be examining the ways in which the public activism of Hindu and Muslim women in New Delhi's slums engenders cooperation between them and a sense of empowerment among them. Conducting her primary research at a slum called Welcome Slum Colony in Delhi, she will explore how urban poor women exploit their informal social networks to subvert or negotiate their marginal identities whithin the development framework that surrounds them.

Sunjin Lee, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, will be exploring the de- and re-construction of American founding myths in contemporary writing by women. By highlighting the simultaneous myth-making and myth-breaking acts of the women writers as "critical mythogenesis," she argues that they attempt to reconfigure American history as a site of fluid and ongoing interactions of multiple communities that transcend the geographic, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual borders of American founding myths.

Past Brown & Kruse Graduate Scholar Awards