The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder has awarded three doctoral dissertation fellowships in religion, media and culture for the 2004-05 academic year.
The three recipients are Alexandra Boutros, Mark Elmore and Bahiyyih Watson Maroon. Each will receive a $12,000 stipend from Lilly Endowment Inc. in Indianapolis.
"These students are outstanding emergent scholars who have a great deal to contribute," said Lynn Schofield Clark, assistant research professor. "Their work will add to understandings of how the proliferation of media systems around the world are changing religious practices and understandings."
This is the third year of the Lilly dissertation fellowship program, made possible by a multiyear grant. The purpose of the fellowship is to bring together students at similar stages in their dissertation research and writing processes who share interests in the intersection of media, religion and culture.
Boutros, a doctoral candidate in the department of art history and communication studies at McGill University in Montreal, studies contemporary intersections of religion, media, commodity culture and globalization in the religious practices of Haitian Vodou in North America.
Elmore, a doctoral candidate in the department of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies visual and print media in northwest India and issues related to Himachali citizenship.
Watson Maroon, a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studies the social transformations accompanying the emergence of innovative media and communication technologies. Her fieldwork is taking place in Casablanca, Morocco.
The fellows will participate in two master seminars. One will take place at the American Academy of Religion Annual Conference in November and the other is a two-day seminar at CU-Boulder in February. At both of the seminars, leading scholars in media, religion and culture will interact with the fellows, their advisers and a research team at CU-Boulder's School of Journalism, headed by Professor Stewart Hoover and Clark.
Three fellowship grants of $12,000 each are available to doctoral candidates engaged in research involving media, religion and culture for 2005-06. The grants are designed to coincide with the development of dissertation research in the early stages of candidacy. Deadline for these applications is April 5, 2005. Applications are available online at .
For more information contact Hoover at (303) 492-4833 or Stewart.Hoover@Colorado.Edu, or Scott Webber at (303) 735-3053 or Webbers@Colorado.Edu.