Congratulations to Maciej Kurzynski! 2020 Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship

Maciej Kurzynski, Ph.D. candidate majoring in Chinese, was one of 33 student selected to receive a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF). SIGF Fellowships is a competitive, university-wide program that awards three-year fellowships to outstanding doctoral students engaged in interdisciplinary research. Since 2008, 262 students have received a SIGF. The SIGF supports Stanford doctoral students in undertaking novel, cutting-edge research and pursuing questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.
 
"My research spans the fields of distributional semantics, cognitive literary studies, and intellectual history. I analyze a large corpus of texts produced in post-1949 China to understand the relationships between vocabularies, affects, and Chinese nationalism. " Kurzynski explains, "the quantitative perspective, by offering new scales through which to read the novel, allows me to zoom out from an individual writer’s literary output to instead analyze its embeddedness within much larger semantic fields. The affective analysis makes it possible to elucidate the emotional activity of literary characters and hence to identify the subject positions, imaginations, and sentiments endorsed or rejected by the party-state. By reading both official and unofficial fiction according to the results of quantitative analysis, I attempt to understand the ways in which writers and intellectuals appeal to human emotionality and negotiate with the PRC nationalism."
 
Reflecting on his selection as a SIGF recipient, Kurzynski comments, "I am really happy to be one of the recipients of the 2020 Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship as it will serve as a wonderful source of motivation during the next few years!"

Details for SIGF can be found here