The Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center and Humanities New York are excited to announce Destry Maria Sibley has been awarded 2024-2025 Graduate Student Public Humanities Fellowship in support her public humanities project "After Mother: A Dissertation Podcast."

Humanities New York and its nine partner universities, comprising the Humanities Centers Initiative, invite grant proposals from advanced graduate students in support of public programming and projects.

Destry Maria Sibley is an oral historian, digital media producer, and doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center, where her research focuses on contemporary women's life writing. In addition to the HCI Public Humanities Grant, Destry's work has been supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, PEN America, Mellon/ACLS, and the American Association of University Women. She teaches seminars in literature and oral history at the City College of New York.

Project title: "After Mother: A Dissertation Podcast"



The After Mother podcast is a short-run audio series that supplements Sibley's dissertation on genres of the maternal in contemporary American memoir. The dissertation seeks to broaden the significations of the maternal figure as a means to expand the value attached to the practices of parenting, caretaking, and kinship-making without reifying the sanctimoniously privileged relationship between mother and child. To fulfill a vision of alternative modalities of motherhood, this research exists as written document and public-facing media, living both within and outside of academia, to reach an audience of fellow scholars as well as listeners outside the university.

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