1 August 2025

The Esperantic Studies Foundation (ESF) awarded Marjorie Boulton Fellowships in 2025 to:
- Çağla Çimendereli, Syracuse University.
- Bipasha Bhattacharyya, University of Cambridge.

Yener Çağla Çimendereli is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Syracuse University. She holds
BAs in Political Science & International Relations and in Philosophy, as well as an MA in Philosophy, all from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Beginning in July 2025, she will be joining Old Dominion University as a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

Çimendereli’s research develops a novel account of linguistic agency to better capture the condition of the multilingual who navigates the world with varying levels of linguistic competence. Drawing from various traditions in philosophy, such as existentialism, feminist epistemology, and philosophy of language, and also from psycholinguistics and ESL, this account takes the speech production process as an integral part of linguistic agency and captures speakers’ intimate relationship with words themselves. As such, this account makes it possible to identify the pragmatically competent nonnative speaker, who is often left outside the scope of linguistic injustice except for identity-related dignity concerns, as a potential victim of linguistic injustice and presents new challenges for theories of linguistic justice. It also shows that, contrary to general opinion, new technologies will not solve all instances of linguistic injustice.

In addition to her research, she serves on the coordination team of the Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy and on the coordination team of the Linguistic Justice Society. She recently established an affiliated group within the American Philosophical Association on Linguistic Justice. With the support of the Marjorie Boulton Fellowship, she will continue developing her work on the phenomenology of nonnative speaking and its implications with the goal of helping nonnative speakers make sense of their linguistic alienation and to raise awareness of the subtle intricacies of nonnative speaking that extend beyond effective communication and identity.

Bipasha Bhattacharyya is a historian of language based at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD dissertation (forthcoming 2025), Esperanto and the Search For a Universal Language in British South Asia c.1887-1947, is the first study of the migration, movements and meanings of the international language Esperanto in British South Asia, which illustrates the many ways in which language functions in empires. She is also currently translating and situating the unpublished correspondence of the American Esperantist Ina Tillman with a Siberian Esperantist whose familial connections date back to Leo Tolstoy ’s own late nineteenth century Esperanto friendly publishing firm, Posrednik.

Bipasha’s interest in the history of Esperanto’s many movements is inspired by her own transnational trajectories. Born in India, raised in the United States and now based in the U.K., she feels personal kinship to ‘la lingvo sen landlimoj’. Her Marjorie Boulton fellowship will facilitate her attempts to historicise Esperanto usage and will take her to individuals and archives in Kolkata, Bolpur, Vienna (virtually), and California.

The Boulton Fellowships support research in all fields of the humanities and social sciences, particularly as they relate to interlinguistics, linguistic justice, intercultural communication, Esperanto, and related phenomena. They were created in honor of the legacy of the late Marjorie Boulton, a prolific author of plays, poems, and prose in Esperanto, as well as the leading biographer in English of L. L. Zamenhof. Previous Fellowship recipients include postdoctoral researchers Edwin Micheilsen (now at the University of Hong Kong) and Guilherme Fians (currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of St. Andrews), Magdalena Madany-Saa, who recently defended her PhD at Pennsylvania State University and Cecilia Gialdini,  a postdoctoral researcher at Ulster University. More information on past recipients.

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