MIT SHASS Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship Program welcomes 2023-24 class

The fellowship program enhances diversity in SHASS and provides fellows with professional support and mentoring. The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship program recently welcomed its 2023-24 class. The purpose of the program is to enhance diversity in SHASS and to provide fellows with additional professional support and mentoring as they enter the field. The fellowships are intended to support scholars from a wide range of backgrounds, who can contribute to the diversity of SHASS and the higher education community. Fellowships support graduate scholars for a nine-month appointment at MIT that generally runs from September through May. They offer an opportunity for scholars who plan a career in higher education and have completed all other PhD requirements to finish their dissertations with access to libraries and faculty of the school. Danah Alfailakawi, MIT Literature Alfailakawi's dissertation, titled "The Abject Queer: Barely being, nonhumans, and death worlds on the Arabian Peninsula," brings the fields of psychoanalysis, queer of color critique, and critical race theory to contemporary literatures of the Arabian Peninsula.