Graduate Students Receive Yale, Fulbright-Hays Fellowships

Each year, Yale University awards fellowships to scholars across disciplines engaging in research in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer studies, enabling recipients to take up residence for a month in New Haven, Connecticut and utilize the research resources included in the University's libraries, manuscript collections, and archives.

Pending conditions of the coronavirus pandemic, Borowski will spend a month in residence at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library pursuing research for his dissertation, which explores the ways that discourses and practices of song were complicit in categorizing, hierarchizing, and delineating peoples at home and abroad throughout Britain’s long 18th century. Borowski has previously been the recipient of the Eileen Southern Fund grant from the American Musicological Society’s Committee on Cultural Diversity and a Stuart Tave Humanities Teaching Fellowship at the University of Chicago, for which he designed and taught his own undergraduate course called Queer Singing | Queer Spaces. Borowski's research has been presented at international conferences in the Atlantic Crossings at the Boston University Center for Early Music Studies and at the Transnational Opera Studies Conference in Paris.

Erol Köymen, a PhD student in ethnomusicology, has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for doctoral research abroad from the United States Department of Education. Köyman – whose research interests include sound studies, the urban land/soundscape, and nationalism, with a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire/Turkey and connections with Central European German-speaking lands – is studying the role and relationship of Western classical music to the populism and authoritarianism of contemporary Turkey.

Köymen most recently presented his research at the Society for Ethnomusicology 2020 Annual Meeting, held online from October 22 – 31, 2020. His paper, Infrastructure of the Extraordinary: Western Classical Music, Elites, and Resistance in Contemporary Istanbul, draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and brings together anthropologies of infrastructure and elites to hypothesize an "infrastructure of the extraordinary" for Western classical music in contemporary Istanbul. In addition to the Fulbright-Hays award, Köymen has received multiple Foreign Language Area Studies grants from the Department of Education and an ARIT fellowship to study modern and Ottoman Turkish. Before beginning graduate study, Köymen held a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Austria for two years.