Core to the goals of the Esperantic Studies Foundation is to raise the prestige of Esperanto among researchers. If researchers take Esperanto seriously, then academics will consider Esperanto as a serious, worthwhile subject. This has not always been the case and more needs to be done.

The Boulton fellowships are competitive grants for research by young scholars to do serious academic work that will advance the understanding of important contributions by Esperantists. The desire is to award the fellowships to researchers in the USA, but the grants are not restricted to any geographical region.

The recipients for 2021 are:

• Guilherme Fians (Brazil)

  Fians received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2019 and is currently Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Brasília. His research project builds on the subject of his PhD dissertation, an ethnographic study of the Esperanto movement in France, and seeks to understand how languages and digital media have an impact on the way people develop and convey political perspectives.

  He writes: “My project will explore how right-wing nationalists mobilize hashtags, bots, languages and other discursive mechanisms to make online political discussions more dynamic and, at the same time, confrontational. Investigating these themes from an original perspective that accounts for these phenomena’s cross-border manifestations, my work will take Brazilians who speak Esperanto as its focus.”

• Edwin Michielsen (Netherlands and Canada)

  Michielsen recently completed his PhD at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on “Proletarian Arts and Internationalism in East Asia.” His Boulton Fellowship will take him to Waseda University and to the Japanese Esperanto Institute to examine the early history of Esperanto in Japan and China and particularly how Esperanto was utilized by proletarian writers in the first half of the twentieth century to assemble a linguistic solidarity worldwide against imperial languages and linguistic oppression.

If you are a researcher in the US who is researching a topic in the areas of planned languages, linguistic justice, the history of Esperanto, or a related topic, please consider applying. If you know of a researcher, please make sure they are aware of the fellowships. Two $10,000 fellowships will be awarded in 2022. For more info, see: Marjorie Boulton Fellowships.