Bylander Awarded NEH Summer Stipend

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a 2021 NEH Summer Stipend to Associate Professor of Sociology Maryann Bylander. This stipend will provide support for Dr. Bylander this summer as she completes her manuscript, “Safe Migration: Documentation, Debt and Development in Southeast Asia” and kicks off her post-tenure sabbatical to begin in the fall.

Safe Migration discusses changing migration dynamics in the Global South, investigates how migrant workers in Southeast Asia navigate a world that is increasingly trying to regulate their movement, and describes how intensified entanglements with formal institutions (NGOs, states, and financial institutions) can generate new costs and risks for both migrants and their families at home. The book is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork Bylander conducted in Cambodia and Thailand during her time as a Fulbright ASEAN Research Scholar (2017-2018).

NEH Summer Stipends are very competitive, with just an 11% funding rate this year. Further, tenure-line faculty at colleges and universities must be nominated and each institution can only put forth two nominations each year. This stipend program provides $6,000 for two months of research and writing; recipients are expected to produce output that is of value to humanities scholars and of interest to general audiences—such as a book, article, or other scholarly resource.

This award is Dr. Bylander’s third successful external grant application in recent years. She was awarded an ASEAN Research Program grant from Fulbright in 2016 and an ASIANetwork Freeman Student-Faculty Fellows grant in 2017.

April 2021