Doctoral student awarded Mellon/ACLS Fellowship

Junting Huang, a doctoral candidate in the field of comparative literature, has received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for his dissertation, “The Noise Decade: Intermedial Impulse in Chinese Sound Recording.”

The fellowships are one of the most competitive in the country for scholars in the humanities and related social sciences. The award includes a $35,000 stipend plus funds for research costs up to $3,000 and for university fees up to $5,000. ACLS awarded 65 of these fellowships for the 2020-2021 academic year and the fellowships are supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition to the monetary support offered, awardees may apply to participate in a three-day seminar to help them prepare for the academic job market.

“I’m honored to be awarded the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship,” Huang said. “It provides not only the financial and research support towards the completion of my degree, but also an important acknowledgement of my dissertation research. As a comparatist who works on interdisciplinary projects, this confirmation is extremely important at this stage of my career.”

Huang’s work focuses on the time period of the 1990s and 2000s, when Chinese and Taiwanese artists began to experiment with recorded sound and its capacity to document shifting social relations. In the aftermath of the Cold War, disruptive tensions in these two societies were embodied in their increasingly “noisy” acoustic environments—from everyday urban soundscapes to labor protests and missile tests.

Huang received his M.St. in film aesthetics from the University of Oxford and his bachelor’s in English literature from Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is the assistant curator at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media at Cornell.