The University of California Psychoanalytic Consortium is very pleased to announce the winners of the 2014 Hayman Dissertation Fellowship, awarded at the 2014 UCIPC Annual Meeting at Lake Arrowhead, CA (May 2 – 4, 2014).

This year, UCIPC awarded two $10,000 Hayman Dissertation Fellowships to advanced graduate students who were at the writing stage of their dissertation. The Hayman Dissertation Fellowship was created to foster and support psychoanalytically informed research on the literary, cultural and humanistic expressions of genocide, racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, inter-ethnic violence, and the Holocaust. The Endowment supports studies in the psychodynamics of personal, group, and international crisis management, de-escalation, conflict resolution, and peace processes.

The 2014 Hayman Dissertation Fellowship Winners are:

1) Niccole Leilanionapae’aina Coggins (UC Santa Barbara – History) – “I Wish They Would Leave Those Negro Soldiers Alone”: Native Hawaiian and Japanese American Perceptions and Interactions with Blacks in World War II Hawai’i.

Niccole Coggins is a PhD candidate in the History program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation examines how race is constructed and contested in Hawai’i’s territorial period, focusing on the perceptions and interactions that Native Hawaiians and Japanese Americans had with Blacks neae the time of World War II (1935-1949). The dissertation draws on previously unused Hawaiian sources (including student written journals and papers), as well as local newspapers. Her privileging of local voices (rather than those of the colonizers) illustrates the temporal reality of day-to-day life on the ground, and also how the ground of race itself shifted over the course of the war. Contrary to the standard narrative that Hawai’i’s multicultural racial paradigm is a model for solving the United States’ racial problems, Coggins argues that Hawai’i operates on the same Black-White racial paradigm as the mainland U.S.

2) Melanie Sherazi (UC Riverside – English)—”Posthumous Afterlives: Ecstatic Readings of Post-1945 American Literature”

Melanie Sherazi is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Riverside, specializing in modern and contemporary American literature. Her dissertation explores the temporal, aesthetic, and ethical implications of posthumously published literary texts by such authors as Ralph Ellison, William Demby, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Her work troubles biographical criticism of such texts and considers the ways in which the time of the posthumously published text gestures back to the historical moment of its writing, even as it highlights shifting conceptions of social identities across time. As such, the mid-century American context is a particularly compelling temporal node for considerations of excess and embodiment in relationship to textuality. Psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, mourning and melancholia, repetition, and the illusion of mastery are central to her project’s examination of our reading and writing practices and their interconnectedness with considerations of mortality.

On behalf of the membership of UCIPC as well as this year’s fellows, we would like to express our deep appreciation to the Hayman Foundation for their ongoing promotion and recognition of psychoanalytically-informed research within the academy, as well as their continued generous support for UCIPC and its activities.