Month: March 2015

Congratulations to PhD candidate Rebecca Frost, who received a Michigan Tech Finishing Fellowship for summer 2015 to support her dissertation work.

Rebecca Frost is a Michigan native who completed her undergraduate studies at Kalamazoo College (Kalamazoo, Michigan) and Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Bavaria, Germany). She completed her master’s in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Tech in 2010, and she is currently working on her dissertation project, Successful True Crime: Serial Killers, Victims, Gendered Bodies, and the Hunt.

This project concerns itself with historical and current impacts of crime narratives in America, focusing on the ways in which crime narratives function as a stabilizing ritual. She hopes that her dissertation will more fully examine the role of crime narratives and the rhetorical strategies within the genre to draw conclusions about American culture and popular beliefs surrounding crime, criminals, and victims, which has impacts for studies of rhetoric, American history, and American culture.

This fellowship gives her the chance to complete more in-depth research, especially primary texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and allows her more time to draw together information from various resources that have until now remained separate instead of in conversation.

Thus far she has discovered that many current publications on true crime and crime narratives are not supported by her extended research, and she hopes to produce a dissertation that will have a large impact on future research into crime narratives and representation. The subject of crime narratives and popular consumption thereof covers many fields and extends back to the first publications on American soil, and is thus an interdisciplinary topic of interest to scholars in many fields, and in the future she hopes to expand this impact further into other disciplines that are affected by crime and the popular perception of criminals, including possibly criminology and further into popular culture studies.

Three RTC PhD students have received RTC Travel Grants to support their presentations at national academic conferences.

The students also received support from the Michigan Tech Graduate Student Government travel grant program.

The Graduate School and Graduate Student Government proudly announce the 2014-2015 academic year winners.

• Swarup China, Niraj Dhital, Maria Gencoglu, Yaoxian Huang, Nayyer Islam, Ranjeeth Naik, Gaurav Pandit, Rachel Rupnow, Anqi Zhang, Andrew Baker, Mehran Bidarvatan, Luke Bowman, Adam Coble, Ashley Coble, Cynthia Delaney, Kamal Dhugana, Ruilong Han, Weilue He, Brian Hutzler, Shuaimin Kang, Jordan Klinger, Udit Shrivastava, Jun Tao, Bo Zhang

Outstanding Teaching Award recognizing graduate students who have exhibited exceptional ability as a teacher, have received excellent evaluations from students, as well as gaining the respect of faculty in their departments:

• Joel Beatty, Patrick Belling, Caitlin Bulkovitz, Bryan Freyberg, Emily Gochis, Bethany Klemetsrud, Toni Larche, Chelsea Mitchell, Kiley Spirito, Daniel VanSlembrouck, Mehran Bidarvatan, Troy Bouman, LiLu Funkenbusch, John Henderson, Murat Koksai, Madhu Kolati, Connor McCarthy, Ashley Miller, Ethan Novak, Mengmeng Qiao, Jennifer Riehl, Katie Snyder, Jennie Tyrrell, Christopher VanArsdale, Erika Vye, Luting Wang

Outstanding Service Award recognizing excellent service to Graduate Student Government and the University community:

• Zachary Champion, Muraleekrishnan Menon, Samuel Roache

Merit Award for Exceptional Student Leader recognizing the ability to work well with others, participation in extracurricular activities and achievements contributing to the overall graduate student community and representing a bearer of integrity to others:

• Abhilash Kantamneni

Merit Award for Exceptional Student Scholar recognizing excellence in areas such as academic pursuits, publications and presentations, and exceptional work ethic:

• Xu Yang

Merit Award for Exceptional Graduate Student Mentor recognizing advocacy for graduate students, being available and encouraging to students, and creativity/interdisciplinary collaboration in new opportunities for graduate students:

• Gregory Odegard

(This originally appeared in Tech Today.)