Small Grants | Esperantic Studies Foundation – Small research grants in all fields of the humanities and social sciences, particularly as they relate to interlinguistics, linguistic justice, intercultural communication, Esperanto, and related phenomena.

We are pleased to welcome our 2025 Marjorie Boulton Fellows, Bipasha Bhattacharyya and Yener Çağla Çimendereli, to our next ESF Connected Live on September 26 at 11:00 AM Eastern Time!

Join us to hear about their fascinating work exploring language from two very different perspectives.

Bipasha Bhattacharyya, a historian of language at the University of Cambridge, researches the history of Esperanto in British South Asia. Her doctoral dissertation is the first study of Esperanto’s migration, movements, and meanings in the region between 1887 and 1947. With the support of the Marjorie Boulton Fellowship, she is continuing to uncover the rich history of Esperanto through archival research spanning India, Europe, and the United States.

Yener Çağla Çimendereli is a Teaching Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University and recently earned her PhD in Philosophy from Syracuse University. Çimendereli’s research develops a novel account of linguistic agency to better capture the condition of the multilingual who navigates the world with varying levels of linguistic competence. Drawing from various traditions in philosophy, such as existentialism, feminist epistemology, and philosophy of language, and also from psycholinguistics and ESL, this account takes the speech production process as an integral part of linguistic agency and captures speakers’ intimate relationship with words themselves.

Come meet our 2025 Fellows, learn more about their research, and bring your questions for the discussion afterward. We hope to see you there!

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89449212564?pwd=QcuflHGCgrsONE60AalTBHYpbDGtIF.1

1 August 2026

The Esperantic Studies Foundation (ESF) awarded a Marjorie Boulton Fellowship in 2026 to:
- Lauren Salig, University of Michigan

Lauren “Ren” Salig is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan (https://umich.edu/), who holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science from the University of Maryland (www.umgc.edu/). Starting in August 2026, she will be an Assistant Professor of Psychology at The College of New Jersey. (https://tcnj.edu/) Working at the intersection of psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience, Dr. Salig studies how variation in language contexts and experiences affects language processing and cognition. For example, her dissertation work suggests that bilinguals pay more attention after hearing a switch between their languages. With the support of the Marjorie Boulton Fellowship, Dr. Salig will continue to evaluate how different language contexts affect bilinguals’ learning and attention, working to better inform policies that can best support students in educational settings.

The Boulton Fellowships support research in all fields of the humanities and social sciences, particularly as they relate to interlinguistics, linguistic justice, intercultural communication, Esperanto, and related phenomena. They were created in honor of the legacy of the late Marjorie Boulton, a prolific author of plays, poems, and prose in Esperanto, as well as the leading biographer in English of L. L. Zamenhof. Previous Fellowship recipients include postdoctoral researchers Edwin Micheilsen (now at the University of Hong Kong) and Guilherme Fians (currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of St. Andrews), Magdalena Madany-Saa, who recently defended her PhD at Pennsylvania State University and Cecilia Gialdini, a postdoctoral researcher at Ulster University. More information on past recipients.

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