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Zantop Travel Award for Graduate Students: New Procedures and Award Amounts
DEADLINE: MARCH 1
Inspired by the work of Susanne Zantop, Women in German established an award in her honor to help nurture and sustain research and publication in feminist cultural studies. The Zantop Travel Award has supported work on more than a dozen dissertations since it was established in 2002. We are happy to announce that progress on WiG's current campaign to endow this fund makes it possible to establish new award amounts, beginning in 2009: Each year WiG will now grant up to two awards, each in the amount of $1500.
Susanne Zantop was Professor of German and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of German at Dartmouth College when she and her husband Half were murdered in January 2001. Their deaths were a blow to Dartmouth, to Women in German, and to the wider academic community.
At the time of her death, Susanne Zantop was serving, with Patricia Herminghouse, as coeditor of the Women in German Yearbook, a task she approached with her characteristic good humor, boundless energy, high standards and formidable critical faculties – tempered by gentleness and good will. Her own scholarly publications have made a lasting impact on our field of German Studies. She authored Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Duke UP, 1997), and edited or coedited several volumes, including Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from Pietism to Romanticism (with Jeannine Blackwell, Nebraska, 1997, 1990); The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (with Sara Lennox and Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Michigan, 1998); and reprints of several of Friederike Helene Unger’s texts. She also published numerous articles on Heine, Unger, and other authors, as well as articles on orientalism, colonialism, and literary theory.
The Zantop Award for Graduate Student Travel, which supports dissertation research by graduate students in German Studies, was established in her honor and awarded for the first time in 2002.
Eligibility
Graduate students who have not yet completed the Ph.D. Applicants must be WiG members with a dissertation project approved by a faculty advisor for research on a topic in feminist German cultural studies that requires travel to consult specific archives, libraries, cultural centers, or authors.
Criteria
1. We seek proposals that address a significant topic with demonstrated relevance to German Studies from an approach informed by feminist cultural studies, that is, an approach that engages the intersections of gender with other relevant categories such as sexuality, class, race, citizenship, and ethnicity. In addition, we encourage proposals that further the project of rethinking German Studies along transnational lines.
2. The proposed research travel must be for the purpose of obtaining access to materials or information not accessible by other means.
3. The materials or information sought must be central to the success of the dissertation project.
4. The research plan must be feasible within the proposed time period.
5. The request for funding must be supported by a letter from a major professor (dissertation advisor or committee member).
Proposal Guidelines
To the student: In a statement of no more than 750 words, describe your dissertation project and explain why travel to the specified site(s) is necessary. In addition, please include the following information (required):
- a timetable
- contact information for the people or institutions you will be working with
- a one-page budget statement listing the projected cost of travel to the site
- the amount requested from WiG, and support anticipated from other sources (if any).
To the faculty member: Please address the quality and significance of the project, the importance of the research travel, and the applicant’s ability to see the project the project through to completion.
Deadline
March 1. The Zantop Award Committee, consisting of the WiG president and two other WiG members, will consider applications and send notifications.
Recipient Responsibility
As soon as is feasible after implementing the award, recipients are to present a report on research results at the poster session of the WiG annual conference. Acknowledgment of the award in the dissertation would be appreciated.
Submit all materials electronically to:
WiG President
president(AT)womeningerman.org