Programs in Anthropology are proud to announce that Skylar Kaat, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology & Education, has been awarded the Center on History
and Education Dissertation Fellowship for 2026-2027. This prestigious fellowship is awarded to one student each year whose dissertation focuses on the history of education. The CHE selection committee awarded Skylar in recognition of their compelling description of the historical power and meaning of their research topic, their project’s clear research design, and their strong grounding in historical and ethnographic research methods. 

Skylar's CHE fellowship will support their dissertation project "Echoes of a Language: Performing to Speak Mongolian in Inner Mongolia, China." 

Skylar's research was conducted in a community center in Inner Mongolia where elderly people come together to learn Traditional Mongolian. It was the language of the participants' parents and grandparents, but one that they never had the chance to learn due to over seventy years of state-led assimilationist agenda promoting Mandarin Chinese. From over a year of ethnographic research, Skylar found that learning Mongolian in their case has shifted in meaning from mastery of the language to its use in performance and as performative acts. These people focus their daily meetings on cultivating the feel of speaking Mongolian through repeating basic phrases and singing Mongolian songs, without understanding most of the Mongolian they utter. Skylar's work explores what can be learned from a case where language survival does not seek fluency or revival in the strict sense, but is about learning to do things with it in public to ensure its presence endures without threatening the dominant language, Mandarin Chinese.

In addition to the CHE Dissertation Fellowship, Skylar has also earned the Jacob Climo Student Travel Award from the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology, and the Life Course to present a chapter from their dissertation at the AAGE conference at University of Massachusetts Amherst in May 2026. The Jacob Climo Award honors the scholarship and mentoring of AAGE past-president Jacob Climo, whose research focused on intergenerational relationships, the ethnography of memory, aging and elder care around the world, grandparents parenting grandchildren, and narratives about aging parents.

We congratulate Skylar on their incredible achievements!