Tessa Swehla, a third-year doctoral candidate with the Department of English, has been chosen to receive a 2020 Graduate Dissertation Research Award by the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

This award, worth $5,000, is intended to cover the travel expenses of a doctoral candidate or student who needs to complete dissertation-related research at a particular library within or outside of the U.S.

Swehla plans to use her award to conduct research on the Octavia E. Butler collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California this summer.

Her dissertation project, currently entitled "And they wonder why disabled people don't trust them": A Critical Analysis of the Medical-Industrial Complex, examines how medical and social narratives of disability are embedded in the knowledge production of the U.S. medical-industrial complex by analyzing the relationship between memoir and speculative texts about disability and debility.

"Being able to read and examine Butler's journals and early manuscripts of her speculative fiction will allow me to strengthen the connection between her experiences with medicine and debility as a black woman and her depictions of such in her fiction," Swehla said. "The Huntington Library has the largest collection of Butler's texts and artifacts, and I am excited to be a part of the research on such a seminal science fiction author."