Ms. Asiya Ikhsanova, a graduate student in Comparative and World Literature, is the recipient of the 2020 Douglas Kibbee award.

The Douglas A. Kibbee Prize was created by the colleagues, friends, and students of Professor Kibbee, Professor Emeritus of French and Italian, in honor of his distinguished academic career and service as the first Director of the School. It is awarded to the recipient of the SLCL Dissertation Completion Fellowship whose dissertation project is judged by the School’s Executive Committee to be particularly worthy of recognition due to its quality and potential impact in its field.

Ikhsanova's dissertation is entitled “Oral Hygiene in Film, Literature, and Advertisement in France, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R” and is co-directed by Professor Robert Rushing and Lilya Kaganovsky. Through an analysis of different cultural texts as well as historical archives, Asiya compares the American experience to oral care those of two other great proponents of modernity, France and Soviet Russia, with a particular focus on differences in managing oral hygiene, and on whether such differences reflect ideological differences between the three nation-states. It is a project poised to make an impact on both biopolitical theory and film studies.