Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award Recipients

True to its namesake, the Nan Johnson Award was created to support graduate students in their scholarship, to enable their  participation at Feminisms and Rhetorics, and to help them find new and returning venues for networking and professionalization. The award is presented biennially in odd years to graduate students working in the field of composition and rhetoric and it recognizes outstanding scholarship and research in the areas of feminist pedagogy, practice, history, and theory. In place of the 2021 Feminisms and Rhetorics, the Coalition opted to open up the award to support free registration at any summer or early fall 2021 conference where recipients can share and deepen their understanding of feminist work.

On behalf of this year’s Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award committee, I am pleased to announce our 2021 award recipients:

Morgan Banville
doctoral student in Rhetoric, Writing and Professional Communication — East Carolina University

Brienna Fleming
doctoral student in Rhetoric and Composition — Ohio University

Priyanka (Priya) Ganguly
doctoral student in Rhetoric and Writing — Virginia Tech

Ashley Pendleton
recent MA in English — University of Missouri-Kansas City
incoming doctoral student in English — Florida State University

Laura Rosche
doctoral candidate in English — Indiana University

Rhiannon Scharnhorst
doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition — University of Cincinnati

Nisha Shanmugaraj
doctoral candidate in Rhetoric — Carnegie Mellon University

Rachel Stroup
doctoral student in English — University of Maryland

Basanti Timalsina
doctoral student in Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture — Michigan Tech

The 9 recipients named above represent all stages of a graduate career, and their work this summer and fall reflects the full range of applications and contributions of  feminist rhetorical histories, theories, and practices to interdisciplinary questions. The 2021 awardees will be attending the 2021 SIGDOC conference, as well as the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2021 Summer Institute, participating in workshops on “Histories of Rhetoric Elsewhere and Otherwise,” “Archival Power,” “Precarity and Visual Praxis,” “Rhetoric and Public Health,” “Rhetoric and Sexual Violence,” “Making a Career in Rhetorical Studies,” and “Engaging Critical Horizons of 21st-Century Feminisms and Rhetorical Studies.”

Please join us in congratulating these scholars, and in thanking the generous donors who made sustaining and increasing this year’s award possible. Finally, please join me in thanking members of the 2021 Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award Committee, who put in several hours of labor over several days at a busy point in the year—for some, at the end of the semester, and for others, in the brief window between spring and summer terms:

David Gold
Karen Hansen-Morgan
Ruby Nancy
Alexis Ramsey Tobienne
Kendall Turchyn

 

Tarez Samra Graban
Immediate Past-President
Awards Chair 2020–2022