The new J.E. Land Fund for SLA Graduate Student Travel, established through the School of Liberal Arts, has enriched the academic experience of graduate students by allowing them to present their papers at academic conferences and meet other scholars in their fields.
The award was established in 2014. Since then, according to Jeremy Jernegan, associate dean of planning and finance for the School of Liberal Arts, it has been given to 30 graduate students.
“We’re trying to encourage students to develop their professional profile and gain experience and networking opportunities through the professional meetings in their respective areas,” says Jernegan.
The award is possible because of the generosity of James E. Land, PhD (G ’38), who left a bequest for the benefit of graduate programs at Tulane.
The Land Fund in the School of Liberal Arts supports up to $1,000 per student per year for conference registration, travel and accommodations. The total allocation for one year is capped at $25,000.
The Land Fund is part of the School of Liberal Arts’ goal to support graduate students, “helping students become contributing members of the academic community,” Jernegan says.
For Tulane University’s Jon Moore, who is working on his PhD in history, the opportunity to attend a prestigious colonial and postcolonial studies conference in Copenhagen proved a thrilling opportunity to interact with experts in his field. The J.E. Land Fund helped support his travel. Moore was one of only a handful of graduate students who presented their research at the Practices of Order: Colonial and Imperial Projects Conference in Denmark. The conference was all the more exciting because its enrollment was capped at 24 participants. “That this conference is purposefully constructed to be an intimate space to meet other scholars in my direct field is an amazing experience for me as a graduate student,” says Moore, who studies the British Empire.
The Land Fund will also help support Rachel Horowitz, a PhD student in anthropology, who will attend the Society for American Archaeology meeting in San Francisco in April. This meeting is particularly important for her because it offers her the opportunity to co-organize a session with Tulane Associate Anthropology Professor Grant McCall. She is also presenting a paper on her dissertation research, looking at stone tool production of the ancient Maya of western Belize. “I . . . enjoy the atmosphere at this conference and always return to campus with new ideas for my research and a better understanding of the current research in the field,” Horowitz says.