UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Mridula Sharma, a master's student in English literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, has been named the 2023 recipient of the Linda Stein Upstander Award administered by Penn State University Libraries. Sharma will be honored and offer a presentation about her research project, “Feminist Metamodernism: New Upstander Visions of Visuality Across Genres,” at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 21, in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, on Penn State’s University Park campus, and also via Zoom online registration.
The Linda Stein Upstander Award honoring Joyce and Diane Froot annually supports social justice activists from around the world whose artistic or scholarly work promotes upstander activities. An online legacy statement about the Linda Stein Upstander Award describes Joyce Froot and Linda Stein’s friendship spanning nearly five decades and Froot’s active collection of Stein’s artwork.
To pursue her project, Sharma will receive $1,500 plus a $2,000 travel grant and will have full access to Penn State’s Linda Stein Art Education Collection in the University Libraries’ Eberly Family Special Collections and Stein’s digital archives at Smith College, as well as Stein’s websites haveartwilltravel.org and lindastein.com. Sharma’s resulting work will be published in ScholarSphere, Penn State’s online institutional repository managed by the University Libraries.
Sharma wrote that her project will focus on Linda Stein’s art, Marisol Escobar’s sculptures and Ana Lily Amirpour's filmography “to examine frictions in normative ways of representing cynicism,” adding, “Stein’s work explicitly defies registers of patriarchal knowledge systems as it goes beyond visible material markers to challenge the discernment of gender identity and sexuality.”
Following Sharma’s presentation, a pop-up exhibition of Stein’s archives will be displayed in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library’s Exhibition Gallery, located in 104 Paterno Library.
Justice activists from around the world whose artistic or scholarly work promotes upstander activities are encouraged to apply for the Linda Stein Upstander Award. Applicants are expected to have specific plans to research archival materials from the Linda Stein Art Education Collection.
Interested applicants may visit the online application site for more information. The annual application deadline for the 2024 award is 11:59 p.m. on Feb. 1.