Those familiar with IRH fellowships know that most fellows are funded by UW–Madison, whether through the generous support of the College of Letters & Science or named endowments. But what some may not know is that IRH often serves as a residential site for winners of American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) awards. In 2024–2025, IRH was thrilled to welcome Kuhelika Ghosh, a doctoral candidate in English at UW–Madison and a winner of the highly competitive Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.
Made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship program is designed to support emerging scholars as they pursue bold and innovative research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Indeed, the dissertation project that Kuhelika has pursued during her fellowship—Cultivating Caribbean Voices: Multispecies Gardens, Care, and Food Justice in Anglophone Caribbean Literature—is nothing short of innovative. Drawing from varied sources such as literary texts, visual culture, physical gardens, recipe books, and policy documents, the project explores multispecies gardens in contemporary postcolonial literature and culture written by Caribbean women writers from the 1960s to the present. From kitchen gardens in Kingston, Jamaica, to flower gardens in the circum-Caribbean region, these domestic spaces, Kuhelika argues, “demonstrate how collaborations between human and plant life have proven central to feminist decolonial politics, whether ensuring access to locally grown foods rather than expensive exports or seeking out sustained practices of nurturing other species as forms of care in colonial regimes.”
As a full-year fellow, Kuhelika received a much-needed break from graduate teaching, a responsibility that she takes extremely seriously. In addition to TA-ing for courses such as Introduction to Asian American Studies, Kuhelika previously served as an instructor at UW–Madison’s Writing Center. For her, the most rewarding aspect of this position was being able to center racial and linguistic justice in her teaching practice. “Sometimes, international students share their difficulties with me in terms of adjusting to writing assignments in an American university and/or writing essays as a multilingual student,” Kuhelika explained. “In addition to providing academic support on their course papers, I sometimes share with students that as an international scholar I too used to struggle with the same concerns. This moment of vulnerability makes the Writing Center classroom a shared space of learning, reducing the uneven power dynamics between the instructor and student.” In 2023, Kuhelika was honored with the TA Teaching Award for Excellence in the Writing Center.
Following her time at the Writing Center, Kuhelika pivoted into an editorial role at Brittle Paper, an online literary magazine for readers of African literature founded and run by IRH alum Ainehi Edoro-Glines (Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Resident Fellow, 2024–2025). This position offered Kuhelika a glimpse into the perspective of both publishers and authors, a perspective that, she notes, is sometimes overlooked in literary studies. “Brittle Paper opened my eyes to the vast world of publishing and the complexities that exist within for writers of African literature, and I felt glad that I could help as much as I could by providing emerging and debut authors a platform to promote their work,” Kuhelika told us. “Most of all, working at Brittle Paper made me see the value of literary studies beyond the university and glimpse the aesthetic and political stakes of African literature for writers, publishers, and readers across Africa and the West.”
Kuhelika has ambitious plans for the summer: finishing her final dissertation chapter, submitting a portion of another chapter for publication, attending and presenting at the biannual Society for Novel Studies conference, and teaching her very own summer course, English 422: Phillis Wheatley (and her legacies). But in between, she is enjoying some of her favorite summer activities in Madison: kayaking, biking, strawberry picking, and the farmer’s market.
IRH wishes Kuhelika all the best as she wraps up her graduate studies, looks forward to celebrating her dissertation defense, and eagerly awaits news of her post-graduate endeavors!