The DHI collected proposals from PhD students in the arts, humanities, and qualitative social sciences for grants to attend the National Humanities Center’s Graduate Student Podcasting Winter Institute, a five-day virtual program that trained PhD students how to design, record, and share a full podcast that applies their humanistic skills to a topic of public interest. Working in cross-disciplinary and intra-university teams, participants learned how to storyboard an idea, to create and collect audio content, and to edit their narrative into an entertaining, powerful podcast. The DHI reserved 8 spots for this competitive award and highly popular program.
Winners:
Marianne Moraes - My name is Marianna Moraes or just Nana, I am a Brazilian lawyer, with a master's degree in Political Science, and now I am doing a Ph.D. in the anthropology department at the University of California, Davis. My interest in research is in sentience and Animal Communication.
Alejandro Ponce De Leon - Alejandro is a Ph.D. candidate in the Cultural Studies graduate program.
Joyan Tan - Joyan Tan is a PhD student in the Religious Studies program at UC Davis. She is primarily interested in comparing Christianity and Daoism on questions of orthodoxy, conceptions of sainthood, and the role of ritual and symbols in funeral rites.
Rebecca “Bex” Jones - Rebecca Jones, or Bex, is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology department at UC Davis. She studies how air pollution emerges as multiple concerns for scientists, politicians, activists and the general populace in London. She focuses specifically on how these multiple ‘air pollutions’ translate into policies and public health advice that do not necessarily address the unevenness of the air, nor ways of breathing, across the city. With a background in filmmaking and broad interests across the arts, from music to ceramics, Bex is experimenting with ways to present her research.
Santiago Bejaranos - I am a Ph.D. student of Literature in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UC Davis. My research focuses on how contemporary Latin American authors depict nonhuman animals in their novels. When I'm not reading, you'll find me birdwatching or hiking.
Brian Aitken - Brian Aitken is a second year Ph.D student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Davis. His research explores the media's effects on people's socio-political attitudes as well as problematic media use among LGBTQ+ individuals.
Melinda Marks - Melinda is an educator, theater performer, and director with an interest in performance history and dramaturgy, applied rhetoric, languages/translation, and equitable and accessible performance education practices. They are interested in further exploring the practice and processes of creating shareable and relatable performance languages to describe diverse cognitive processes.
PHDeep
Faith Bennett - Faith Bennett is a fourth year PhD student in the History Department with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research. Her research is focused on labor organization and challenges to food service industry norms in the San Francisco and Bay Area throughout the twentieth century.
Laura Catterson - Laura Catterson is a third year PhD student in the department of Comparative Literature at UC Davis. She works on Arabic and Persian literature. Her current research focuses on nationalism in Iranian and Iraqi modernist poetry through the lens of feminist theory.