Javiera Barrientos, a CLAS PhD candidate in English Literature, was awarded an Andrew Mellon Foundation Completion Fellowship in the Humanities. This prestigious and highly competitive award honors exceptional scholarly achievements and the significance of the recipient’s doctoral project. This year, it was granted to only five Rutgers PhD candidates.
Javiera’s dissertation "Literary Landfills. Transoceanic Histories of Bibliographic Waste in the Early Modern World" examines the material and transoceanic histories of early modern books, focusing on how processes of circulation, use, and deterioration—particularly within colonial and maritime contexts—reshape our understanding of literary production, readership, and archival survival. Drawing on extensive multilingual archival research conducted across the Americas, the project offers a hemispheric account of the social lives of books. It intervenes in early modern literary studies, book history, and the environmental humanities.