Ariane Helou, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Literature, has been awarded a 2013-14 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from The American Council of Learned Societies.
Helou’s $30,000 fellowship is one of 64 awarded this year to advanced graduate students "pursuing promising and ambitious Ph.D research" from 32 universities and more than a dozen humanistic disciplines. Fellows were selected from a pool of nearly 1,000 applicants through a multi-stage peer-review process.
“The fellowship program intervenes at a critical juncture in a scholar’s professional development,” said Matthew Goldfeder, director of fellowship programs at ACLS. “It aims to support fellows in the final year of dissertation writing as they improve the project that will form the basis of their early postdoctoral research agenda and publications.”
Helou’s dissertation, "Figures of Voice in Early Modern Europe," explores theories of vocality in modern and early modern sources, and examines the status of voice as a nexus of lyrical expression, affect, and embodiment in Renaissance poetry, drama, and music.
“I believe strongly in academic work that combines both theory and practice, so in addition to my scholarly research, I am also active in early music performance as a woodwind player and singer, and in theater as a dramaturg and language specialist,” said Helou.
My secondary research field is food studies--food writing and history of gastronomy. I am in the process of putting some of my translations of early modern cookbooks online at renaissancefood.wordpress.com,” she added.
