Michelle Decker, an assistant professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, California, has been selected as the winner of the Arnold L. Graves and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities from the American Council of Learned Societies. The award is given to young faculty in the first decade of their careers to “encourage and reward outstanding accomplishment in actual teaching in the humanities.” The award comes with a $10,000 prize.
The funding will allow Dr. Decker to conduct two months of research in Durban, South Africa — the city with the largest population of people of Indian descent outside the subcontinent — to study Indian South African literature. She is working on a book on the subject and will teach a course on Indian South African expression at Scripps College.
Dr. Decker joined the faculty at Scripps College in 2015. She holds a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in comparative literature, all from Pennsylvania State University,