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Marjorie Boulton Fellowships Awarded
29 June 2021
TWO YOUNG SCHOLARS RECEIVE BOULTON AWARDS
Guilherme Moreira Fians and Edwin Michielsen are the 2021 recipients of the Marjorie Boulton Fellowships of the Esperantic Studies Foundation.
Guilherme Moreira Fians (Brazil) received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2019 and is currently Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Brasília. He is co-editor of the journal Esperantologio / Esperanto Studies and serves on the board of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (CED). His research project builds on the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation, an ethnographic study of the Esperanto movement in France, and seeks to understand how languages and digital media have an impact on the way people develop and convey political perspectives. “My project will explore how right-wing nationalists mobilize hashtags, bots, languages and other discursive mechanisms to make online political discussions more dynamic and, at the same time, confrontational,” comments Dr. Fians. “Investigating these themes from an original perspective that accounts for these phenomena’s cross-border manifestations, my work will take Brazilians who speak Esperanto as its focus.”
Edwin Michielsen (Netherlands and Canada) holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Leiden in Japanese studies and has recently (2021) completed his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on “Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia.” He has served as Visiting Research Fellow at Waseda University and Visiting Junior Fellow at Seoul National University and has done additional research work in China (Tsinghua University) and Japan (Tokyo University). His Marjorie Boulton Fellowship will take him back to Waseda University and to the Japanese Esperanto Institute to examine the early history of Esperanto in Japan and China and particularly how Esperanto was utilized by proletarian writers in the first half of the twentieth century to assemble a linguistic solidarity worldwide against imperial languages and linguistic oppression.
The Boulton Fellowships are named for Marjorie Boulton (1924-2017), a leading poet and scholar in Esperanto over many years and well known also as an educator and scholar of English language and literature. Author of a series of eight popular books on literature beginning with The Anatomy of Poetry (1953), Dr. Boulton also produced the standard biography of the founder of Esperanto, L.L. Zamenhof, in both English and Esperanto editions. In Esperanto she wrote original poems, essays and plays. She held a doctorate from Oxford University and was a member of the Esperanto Academy.
“We are delighted to be able to assist these two young scholars in their examination of the way in which the movement for the International Language Esperanto intersects with larger political and linguistic forces,” commented Charles O. Mays, executive director of the Esperantic Studies Foundation, “We are honored to welcome them into the ESF research community.”
Students at Poznan Interlinguistics Program (photo: Ilona Koutny)
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