My PhD research on Asexuality in literature

[K. Derrick]

Hello everyone,

 

This is my first post here, so if I am in the wrong place, please forgive me and direct me where to go.

 

My name is Keith Derrick and I am about to begin a PhD program at Georgia State University.  My area of study will be asexuality and its depiction in literature prior to asexuality entering the zeitgeist after the Kinsey studies of the 1950's.  I already have a few characters that are of interest to me (Sherlock Holmes, Jughead Jones, etc.) and am hoping to uncover many more.  Sadly there is very little research done in this area and I am hoping to develop an encompassing Asexual Literary Theory.  It could really be groundbreaking.  You can read more about my research and keep up-to-date with it at my website.

 

But I do have some questions and the community might be able to answer them.  Specifically, what is the best way to go about funding my study?  I'm anticipating receiving a tuition waiver in exchange for filling an empty TA position.  But that will only cover tuition and not other costs (living expenses, transportation costs for literary conventions, books, etc.).  I suppose my biggest concern is not for the expenses I can think of, but the expenses I can't think of.  My current funding ideas are as follows:

• search for grant money
• petition large organizations and groups for grant money
• take donations on my website with tiered rewards for certain amounts of donation (a signed copy of one of my books, a pre-made MintyPi or Minecraft Server, etc.)
• take donations in the form of direct bitcoin mining

I'm not certain if any of those will be effective, though.  I would love to hear any ideas, especially from those of you whom have experience at this.  I would also be happy to talk about my research in general.  My chief concern with where the money comes from is that often in academia, when money comes from certain non-traditional sources, the resulting research is deemed suspect.  Take a lung cancer study being funded by big tobacco as an example.  I don't want to work on this project and end up negatively affecting the community as a result simply because the funding for the research may not be from traditional sources.  This may be premature since I may be fully funded by the university, but I want to have my bases covered just case things don't work out the way I hope they will.

 

Thank you,

K. Derrick