Congratulations to Global Studies PhD student Tymoteusz Chajdas who has been chosen as one of UCSB’s 2020-21 recipients of the Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship and the IHC Dissertation Fellowship. These two prestigious and generously funded fellowships are intended to enable graduate students to devote their full attention to dissertation writing. The IHC Fellowship specifically supports doctoral candidates whose research facilitates dialogue across the traditional disciplinary boundaries between the arts & humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

 

“Both the Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship and the IHC Dissertation Fellowship came as wonderfully encouraging news during these uncertain times,” Chajdas said. “I am very excited to take a long-awaited break from teaching and focus all my attention and energy on writing.” 

 

“In my dissertation, provisionally entitled 'Silk Road Redux: The Specter of Ambitious China in the 21st Century,' I focus on the unquestioned basis of the Silk Road as an enlivening historical concept. I suggest that conversations about China’s rising power miss the complexity of its peculiar diplomacy, which has been used to legitimate and justify a project referred to as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). My dissertation makes a case for the Silk Road Redux, or a revival of meanings circulating across infrastructural, technological and multimedia components that began to re-present the development of China’s worlding globally. My project involves an in-depth study of texts, blueprints and physical objects to better understand the BRI and modern China.”

 

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

 

 

 

 

Image: Tymoteusz Chajdas with fellow "Belt and Road scholars" as well as Professors Wang Hui and Maria Adele Carrai at Ca' Foscari University's Marco Polo Centre for Global Europe-Asia Connections in Venice, Italy.