LeiAnna X. Hamel, a Ph.D candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures, has been awarded a Graduate Student Fellowship from the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) of UIUC for the 2021-22 academic year.

Her research project is titled “Undisciplined Bodies: Deviant Female Sexuality in Russian and Yiddish Literatures, 1877-1929." Hamel analyzes the depiction of female bodies and eroticism in Russian and Yiddish literatures alongside medical, anthropological, and journalistic examinations of female sexuality. Her project poses the question: How did the sexualized (Jewish) female body became the locus for anxieties about modernization in Russian and Yiddish texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Hamel is one of three SLCL graduate students and three SLCL faculty members who have been awarded HRI fellowships for 2021-22.

HRI’s theme for the year is “Symptoms of Crisis.”