W. Ann and Rachel Reynolds Dissertation Fellowship To Fund PhD Candidates in English
UIC English alumna and her mother, former dean at UIC, donate $1 million to support English PhD program.
The English Department at UIC has recently received a remarkably generous gift of $1 million to support its PhD students working on their dissertations: the W. Ann and Rachel Reynolds Dissertation Fellowship Fund. Managed through the Graduate College, the Reynolds Fund will provide a financial boost to outstanding advanced PhD candidates who have completed at least one chapter of their dissertations.
"We are delighted to have this fund, which will help our extraordinary graduate students - who bring so much intellectual energy to the classroom, the university, and the city itself - bring their work to its strongest fruition," said Director of Graduate Studies and Professor of English Peter Coviello.
Interested graduate students will submit a cover letter, project description, completed dissertation chapter, and two letters of recommendation to apply for the fund. Details on the application process will be announced via email and posted on the English website.
Speaking about why they chose to support UIC's English Department, specifically, Rachel Reynolds commented, “For years, UIC English PhDs have gone on to extraordinary influence in people’s lives, in places like Berkeley and East Lansing but also Chicago-based spaces of educational opportunity like Wright College and Roosevelt University. We wanted to contribute to keeping this legacy strong as it’s one of the most important conduits for the human development of diverse peoples in American society that we can think of."
Rachel received her PhD from UIC English in 2002, and is now Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies and Modern Languages and the Department of Communication and a Graduate Faculty Member in Communication, Culture & Media at Drexel Univeristy. Dr. W. Ann Reynolds spent 14 years at UIC, first teaching in the Department of Anatomy in the College of Medicine and eventually becoming the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Dean of the Graduate College. After leaving UIC for a Provost position at Ohio State University, she went on to head both the California State University system and the City University of New York as Chancellor and served as the President of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.