UR English Professor Awarded $95,000 Fellowship for Research on the Intersection of Human Extinction and the Arts

Julietta Singh, associate professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Richmond, has been awarded a $95,000 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars by the American Council of Learned Societies.

The fellowship enables Singh to complete a nine-month residency during the 2019-2020 academic year at Columbia University’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She will spend her time in New York City working on two chapters and the introduction to her forthcoming book On the Verge: Experiments in Extinction. In her book Singh examines a wide variety of feminist and queer artists and their artistic representations of human extinction.

“The question of how to represent the threat to our survival looms large in contemporary art, literature, and performance,” said Singh. “Most of these artists I study refuse the common construction of the human as the top of a species chain. Instead they represent us as deeply integrated and deeply vulnerable creatures whose relationships to each other and the environments that sustain us need to be urgently reconfigured if our collective aim is a future that sustains human life.”

Singh has taught at the University of Richmond since 2010. She obtained her M.A. from McMaster University in Canada and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements and No Archive Will Restore You.

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The Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars support scholars in the humanities and social sciences in the crucial years immediately following the granting of tenure, and provide potential leaders in their fields with the resources to pursue long-term, unusually ambitious projects. Burkhardt Fellowships are generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.