Congratulations to Global Studies PhD student Sarp Kurgan, who has been chosen as UCSB’s 2020-21 recipient of the Fletcher Jones Fellowship.

 “This fellowship will significantly contribute to my dissertation as it will allow me to fully concentrate on writing in my last year at UCSB,” Kurgan said. “I'm very thankful for the faculty's confidence in my research and for nominating me for this award. I truly appreciate their support.”

The Fletcher Jones Fellowship was initially presented at UC Berkeley and UCLA in 1997-98, and the first award at UCSB was made in 1999-00. The program, which was established to benefit graduate students and derives from gifts received from the Fletcher Jones Foundation of Los Angeles, is among the University of California’s most prestigious and generously funded fellowships. The fellowship is intended to enable graduate students to devote their full attention to dissertation writing.

“My dissertation's field is comparative intellectual history and political theory,” Kurgan said. “More precisely, I'm working on progressive radical intellectuals in Turkey, with comparisons to their Egyptian and Iranian counterparts, between 1920 and 1980. I analyze the transformation of intellectual narratives on independence, development, and the state. I further explore how socioeconomic structures influenced the making of intellectual narratives and how intellectual-state relations influenced the modernization processes in the Middle East.”

This award reflects our faculty’s confidence in Kurgan’s excellent performance and promise of productive future scholarship. Congratulations!