CGU Announces Transdisciplinary Dissertation Award Winners

The dynamic issues of the world demand approaches that travel across disciplinary spaces to inspire new ideas. To achieve this goal, Claremont Graduate University awards up to five Transdisciplinary Dissertation Awards annually to PhD candidate across our departments and schools.

These awards recognize students who have embraced a transdisciplinary research approach and developed compelling and feasible projects. Fellows are chosen based on their academic work and incorporation of transdisciplinary concepts, intellectual merit and impact, timeline and methodological feasibility, and potential contributions to both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary ways of thinking. Each recipient is awarded $10,000 in support of their research.

“This year, we wanted to recognize the work of our students who champion transdisciplinarity—a collaborative, academic approach to that which is most complex,” said Director of Transdisciplinary Studies Andrew Vosko. “Our Transdisciplinary Dissertation Fellows represent the type of academic reframing we strive for here at Claremont Graduate University.”

The following five Fellows were chosen:

Megan Gallagher
Eighteenth-Century Annotations and Marginalia in Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio

Gallagher’s dissertation work analyzes the analyst. By looking at the accidental and substantive edits on Shakespeare works, she paints a picture of the cultures and motivations of the eighteenth century literary world that still hold influence over literary scholarship today.

Allison Hamlin
Renegotiating NAFTA: Making Trade Great Again?

Hamlin’s work takes us to the present day, where NAFTA is back in the spotlight, and there are talks of its re-negotiation. She will predict negotiation outcomes by considering geospatial factors and different modeling paradigms, and then further using econometrics to predict how changes in NAFTA will have effects across North America.

Sarah Mason
Testing a Model for Training Program Evaluators in Situation Awareness

Mason’s dissertation proposal examines the art of evaluation—where contextual flexibility and situational awareness are key. While experience might be the best teacher, she questions whether it’s the only one. Mason combines educational and psychological frameworks to create a resource for developing evaluation expertise and evaluating its efficacy.

Kevin Riel
Extending the Poem: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” Annotated

Riel’s proposal digs into Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “The Book of the Dead.” By studying this 20th-century work through scholarly lenses that are literary, historical, medical, economic, and legal, Riel synthesizes new commentary and provides annotations for this rich work.

Kristoffer Wikstrom
Agents of Opposition? Simulating Community Conflict Over New Energy Facilities

In creating infrastructure for new and sustainable energy, it is important to engage citizens in the process of deciding where to site this infrastructure. Wikstrom’s work proposes a model to predict citizen participation. His task demands theories and tools from psychology, economics, and engineering, with the goal of creating a tool to help policy makers create sustainable communities.

This year’s Transdisciplinary Dissertation Fellows will be recognized at CGU’s Commencement Forum in Albrecht Auditorium, May 12 at 4:30 pm.