Four College of Arts & Letters Ph.D. candidates have been awarded 2025-26 Graduate Dissertation Fellowships by the Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan State University for their research projects that will include a significant focus on women, gender, or sexuality.
These Women’s & Gender Studies Dissertation Fellowships are made possible through the generous funding provided by MSU’s Graduate School.
Two of the Ph.D. candidates – Ariana Costales-Del Toro and Vanessa Weller – received Dissertation Research Awards, which are for up to $10,000. The two other Ph.D. candidates – Kailey Henderson and Sarah Potts – received Dissertation Writing Awards, which are for up to $8,500.
Dissertation Research Awards
Ariana Costales-Del Toro
Ariana Costales-Del Toro is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English. She has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and a Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus.
Her research interests focus on Caribbean and queer studies, contemporary literature and performance, gender, queer survival, queer kinship and religiosity.
Her proposed dissertation, “Queer Reformations of Christianity in the Caribbean,” will look at contemporary literary and performative works by queer Caribbean artists and activists who explore the relationship between queerness and the Christian Church within the Caribbean.
Vanessa Weller
Vanessa Weller is a Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant in French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies. She has an M.A. in Cultural Translation from the American University in Paris and a B.A. in German Literature and French and Francophone Studies from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Her research interests focus on 19th and 20th century French literature, early cinema and media studies, Modernism, translation theory, Caribbean and Maghrebi postcolonial literature, and poetry as political activism.
Weller is the editor-in-chief of TROPOS, the oldest graduate student-led academic journal in Romance Studies in North America.
Her proposed dissertation, titled “”Gendered Performance and Innovation in the Parisian Avant-Garde, 1896-1945,” will focus on the role of mass media in the Parisian avant-garde movements of the early 20th century and the intersections of class, race, and gender within those movements.
Dissertation Writing Awards
Kailey Henderson
Kailey Henderson is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Cultural Studies in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies and a Graduate Teaching Assistant of Spanish. Additionally, she completed the interdisciplinary Graduate Specialization in Women’s and Gender Studies in 2023 and the Graduate Certificate in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) in 2022.
She has an M.A. in Hispanic Literatures from Michigan State University and received a B.A. in Spanish and English with a minor in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Albion College.
Her research focuses on Peninsular literature and cultural studies, early modern Spanish theatre, and gender and sexuality studies, especially trans studies.
Her proposed dissertation, titled “Transing Representations of Amazons in Early Modern Spanish Theatre,” will analyze representations of Amazons in Spanish Golden Age theatre through a trans studies lens, focusing on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and performance.
Sarah Potts
Sarah Potts is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, with an Interdisciplinary Graduate Specialization in Women’s and Gender Studies. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, she has taught a range of courses at MSU, including Introduction to Women Writers (ENG 153), Readings in Women Writers (ENG 353), and Introduction to Contemporary Feminisms and Gender Theories (WS 202).
She has an M.A. in English from Michigan State University and a B.A. in English and Spanish with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. Her research interests include transatlantic modernist literature and culture, esoteric modernisms, feminist theory, and queer ecologies.
Her dissertation, “Sex and Spirituality: The Queer Fantastic in Modernist Women’s Writing,” examines the queer fantastic and legacies of decadence in the work of modernist women writers Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, investigating their engagements with the supernatural and spiritual as modes of forging queer kinship.
Her article “Enchanted Aesthetic Lineages and Queer Intersubjectivity: Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and Virginia Woolf,” was published in Modernist Cultures in November 2024.
By Kim Popiolek
