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The Graduate School has awarded 2021 Distinguished Dissertation Awards to Paige Byerly, Ph.D. in biology, and Khirsten Doolan, Ph.D. in English.

The Distinguished Dissertation Award was established by the Graduate School to recognize exceptional work by doctoral students and to encourage the highest levels of scholarship, research, and writing.
Winners are selected annually on a rotating basis from two of the four fields of competition—biological and life sciences, humanities and fine arts, social sciences and education, and mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering.

Byerly is the Distinguished Dissertation Award recipient for biological and life sciences. She earned her in May 2021 under the direction of Dr. Paul Leberg, John E. and Joretta Achee Chance Professor of Biology. Byerly’s dissertation, “Ecology and Conservation Genomics of Roseate Terns (Sterna dougallii) in North America,” focused on factors affecting the genetic structure, nest success, and foraging ecology of the threatened Caribbean Roseate Tern.

“Paige was a stellar student who knew what she wanted to do when she joined our doctoral program, which was to try to help save North Atlantic and Caribbean populations of Roseate Terns, which are beautiful small sea birds, from going extinct,” recalls Dr. Brad Moon, South Louisiana Mid-Winter Fair/BORSF Professor and graduate coordinator for the biology Ph.D. program, who served on Byerly’s dissertation committee.

While at UL Lafayette, Byerly held a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She secured an additional $52,000 in funding for her dissertation research.

Leberg notes that Byerly “developed her research with only limited guidance from me, generated her own funding, and took the work in directions that have expanded the research capabilities of my lab. The species she chose to investigate has not been well studied outside of New England, and her work makes large contributions to our understanding of the biology of the Roseate Tern, and other seabirds, on tropical islands.”

“The quality of Paige’s dissertation points to her motivation and dedication to conservation research, as well as her superb analytical, organizational and critical thinking abilities,” he says.

Byerly’s research has yielded five peer-reviewed publications and five technical reports for conservation agencies, as well as a cover story for American Scientist and articles in the Roseate Tern Newsletter. She has given numerous academic presentations and invited talks to local, state, and national organizations.

Byerly is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation Genomics in Washington, D.C.

Doolan is the Distinguished Dissertation Award recipient for humanities and fine arts. They earned their in May 2021 under the direction of Dr. Shelley Ingram, associate professor of English.

Doolan’s dissertation, “The Blood of the Covenant: A Queer Southern Literary Genealogy,” traces a cultural history of southern queerness through portrayals of nonbiological kinship, including the texts and archives of Tennessee Williams and Pauli Murray and the speculative fiction of Blake M. Hausman.

Doolan writes “about a particular experience of living queer in the south and about reclaiming southern spaces from the monolithic narrative that sees the American south as all one thing: white, male, straight, and bigoted,” Ingram notes.

Doolan also succeeds in making their subject matter accessible to non-specialist readers, Ingram says. “This skill is invaluable, as they are able to walk their reader through complex ideas and histories while never alienating readers with distracting jargon.”

Their dissertation has “real world implications for how we think about the south, about queerness, about community and family and kinship,” she says.

Dr. Leah Orr, associate professor of English and graduate coordinator for the department, notes that “the best dissertation projects cause us not only to see new elements of literature and culture of the present and discover new topics and texts that have not been studied, but also to re-evaluate what we thought we already knew about works that have been thoroughly studied. This dissertation does all three.”

Doolan’s research investigates the South as “a place where many peoples, cultures, languages, and communities have always been living, though not always recognized in their diversity,” Orr says.

“This is a type of study that UL Lafayette is especially well-positioned to encourage, and Khirs has made use of the wide variety of faculty expertise in our department as well as their own deep research to develop this topic,” she adds.

Doolan has joined the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Cultural Studies at Northwestern State University as an instructor of English. Their recent article, "'They Cleaved or Whatever’: Teenage Bounty Hunters and a Reverent Southern Queerness," will appear in the Fall/Winter 2021 issue of Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South.

Byerly and Doolan will each receive a monetary prize of $500. The Graduate School has also nominated them for the annual Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards.

Congratulations to our award recipients and their contributing faculty members on these impressive contributions to their disciplines!