Kersti Francis wins Charles E. and Sue K. Young Graduate Student Fellowship Award for 2021-22
Congratulations to Kersti Francis, PhD candidate in English at UCLA, for winning the Charles E. and Sue K. Young Graduate Student Fellowship Award. This prestigious award bestowed by the College Deans recognizes “outstanding graduate students for exemplary academic achievement, research, and service to the campus and the community.”
As a PhD candidate in English at UCLA, Kersti works on the intersections between magic, gender, and sexuality in the Middle Ages and early English Renaissance (1100-1600). Her dissertation project, Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin and The Supernatural in the Later Middle Ages, uses the guiding framework of medieval understandings of nature and sins contra naturam to argue that literary magic functions as a “safe” form of heresy for authors to engage in queer imaginings of bodies, genders, and sexual acts.