Professor of English Sarah Brouillette is the winner of the 2017-18 Marston LaFrance Research Fellowship. Granted annually to one senior faculty member in Carleton’s Faculty of Arts and Social Science, this award is meant to facilitate the completion of a major research project.
Professor Brouillette’s project, “A Global History of Cultural Policy,” tries to understand how cultural policy, defined as official, institutionally backed expressions of governments’ dispositions toward and desires for culture and the arts, relates to the fate of the global economy writ large. The project is the recipient of an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Professor Brouillette admits that hers is a large undertaking. She relies extensively on graduate students as research assistants: during the summer of 2016, for example, English doctoral candidate David Thomas undertook research at the UNESCO archives in Paris, and John Coleman, also Ph.D. student in English, oversaw a research project that collected data regarding the ethnic diversity of contributors to British literary journals. Seonaid Watson, an M.A. student in English who is now entering Carleton’s communications Ph.D. program, and Emily Keays, a fourth-year undergraduate student, carried out further research. Recent British cultural policy precisely targets and attempts to foster industry diversity, so the student-driven research from the summer of 2017 is connected to the larger project.
The award gives Professor Brouillette a full year of teaching release in order to complete the project, which will add yet another dimension to her growing body of internationally recognized work on the relation between economic policy and the literary field. Other recent recipients of the Marston LaFrance Fellowship from English include Professor Donald Beecher (2010-11) and Professor Sukeshi Kamra (2007-08).