Traveling to collect research is often an essential part of graduate students’ dissertations. Thanks to the generosity of our donors, Communication Arts awards many students with funding that makes research travel more accessible and allows them to choose a topic that would otherwise be limited by the archival resources in Madison alone. The Vance and Betty Kepley Dissertation Award is the department’s most prestigious award, and the three most recent recipients have utilized the funds to visit facilities and archives that were essential to the progression of their work.
Alicen Rushevics is a fifth-year Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture Ph.D. candidate who is researching the rhetoric of reparation legislation between Indigenous communities in the Pacific and the U.S. government. Thanks to the Kepley Dissertation Award, Rushevics has gone on three research trips to further her work.
Rushevics’s first dissertation case looks at the internment of Unangax̂ residents of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands off the coast of Alaska by the U.S. government during WWII. Rushevics traveled to the National Archives in Maryland to listen to Unangax̂ witness testimonies for the congressional committee hearings in the 1980s. She also traveled to the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, CA to view his reactions and oppositions to reparations for the Unangax̂ while he was president.
Rushevics’s next case looks at the Hawaiian Apology Resolution in 1993, for which she traveled to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Congressional Archives in Honolulu, HI. Here, she reviewed documents related to the U.S. congressional apology to native Hawaiians. The third chapter Rushevics is working on will focus on the Compacts of Free Association agreements which establish the governing relationship between the U.S. and three of the Pacific Island sovereign states. Rushevics plans to return to Honolulu by the end of 2024 to parse through these agreements and complete her dissertation research.
John Bennett, a Film Ph.D. candidate, was inspired by The Battle of Algiers for his dissertation research and is now focusing on the Algerian film industry’s global dimensions. After receiving funding from the Kepley Dissertation Award, Bennett traveled to the Algerian Cultural Centre and the Defense Ministries in Paris, France, as well as the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, Italy.
While at the Defense Ministries, Bennett looked through French military intelligence concerned with Algerian documentaries that were circulating internationally while the country was at war. These materials were recently declassified in 2020, and Bennett was excited to look through and include these pieces in his research.
Traveling internationally was imperative and opened doors for Bennett to search through documents that cannot be found in the U.S. After a first research trip to France,he received a second grant from the French government and was invited to present at a research laboratory there.
Allyson Gross, a Rhetoric, Politics and Culture Ph.D. candidate and Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow, is focusing her dissertation on time capsules, cryonics, nuclear waste, and how certain ideas and ideologies might influence audiences of the future.
After receiving a Kepley award, Gross traveled to the Detre Library & Archives at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburg, PA. While there, she searched through correspondence for the Westinghouse World’s Fair time capsules to understand the debates about which artifacts would and would not be included.
On the way to Pittsburg, Gross also stopped in Clinton Township, MI to visit the Cryonics Institute, which was founded shortly after the process was theorized in the 1960s. Gross toured the facility where they keep numerous patients and talked with workers at the facility to further understand the process.
Awards like the Kepley give students the opportunity to visit facilities and archives around the world. This helps them craft stronger arguments and gives them the best chance of completing dissertations th