Gordon Parks Fellowship

The Gordon Parks Fellowship has been established to honor Gordon Parks’ legacy by generous contributions to the Wichita State University Foundation. The Fellowship is used to recruit and retain top applicants from underserved populations, providing financial support to students who might be otherwise unable to pursue further graduate instruction. It is awarded on an annual basis to a graduate student(s) enrolled full or part time in the MA in English program at Wichita State.

About Gordon Parks

A celebrated American photographer, film director, musician, writer, and humanitarian, Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912. A self-taught artist, Mr. Parks is one of the most important photojournalists of the twentieth century; his work consistently gave voice to national concerns over poverty, racial discrimination, and civil rights. Mr. Parks established his deep commitment to social justice early in his career through a series of photographs featuring Chicago’s South Side. These images won Mr. Parks a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for Photography in 1941. He used this funding to document social conditions while working with the Farm Security Administration. “American Gothic,” Mr. Parks’ most renowned image, was taken during his time with the FSA. Mr. Parks would continue to build a successful career as the first African-American fashion photographer and photojournalist for Vogue and Life magazine. In the 1960s, he turned toward writing and filmmaking, becoming the first African-American to direct a major Hollywood film in 1969 with The Learning Tree. Filmed in Kansas, this adaptation of Mr. Parks’ 1963 autobiography was selected by the U.S. Library of Congress as one of the first 25 films to be honored for preservation in the National Film Registry. Until his death in 2006, Mr. Parks remained committed to social justice and has received national recognition for his humanitarian work.

"Philippine literature yields an understanding of how empire shaped Philippine culture and how, in turn, Filipinos continually reclaim language in order to give a voice to their oppression. English and Spanish as world languages—altered and adapted by native tongues such as Tagalog, Cebuano, and Ilocano—are the instruments through which Filipinos can express their unique historical and cultural experiences while in conversation with a wider, multicultural audience."

-Abby Bayani-Heitzman, Gordon Parks Fellowship recipient (Spring 2020), on her research interests at WSU

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In His Words

“My life to me is like a sort of a disjointed dream. I can't explain it to you; things have happened to me that are incredible... But all I know is there was a constant effort, a constant feeling that I must not fail, and I still have that. And now I feel, at 85, I really feel that I’m just ready to start. There’s another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know?” -Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks at WSU

Wichita State currently maintains a strong relationship with Mr. Parks and his body of work. Over the past 40 years, the university has hosted a number of events honoring and celebrating the talents and career of Gordon Parks, including the Gordon Parks lecture series at WSU, which began in 2009.

The special collections department of the University's Ablah Library houses and regularly exhibits the Gordon Parks Papers, having acquired 140 boxes of his manuscripts, letters, photos, and other papers in 2008. The Ulrich Museum obtained an additional 125 photographs from The Gordon Parks Foundation in 2014, further expanding Wichita State's holdings of Parks' work.

The Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences hopes to continue to honor Parks' legacy at Wichita State through this prestigious fellowship.

Diversity and Inclusivity in the English Department

The Master of Arts program in English Literature at Wichita State University draws on methods of teaching and scholarship to equip graduate students with the knowledge and skills necessary both to the outstanding teacher and to the well-prepared candidate for further graduate study. In doing so, it provides students with the educational and cultural tools they need to thrive in a complex world, and to achieve both individual responsibility in their own lives and effective citizenship in local, national and global contexts. To obtain this outcome, our curriculum offers a diverse array of classes, many of which are representative of the Gordon Parks legacy, including Parks’ commitment to social justice and multigenre creativity. In recent years, the English department has regularly offered graduate-level classes that promote cultural competency, including seminars in African American literature, Native American literature, and women’s literature. Students in these classes and others learn to critique the stereotypes that too often lead to exclusionary practices and acquire a critical vocabulary they can use to promote diversity.

The English department believes that a more diverse graduate student population not only enhances the academic experiences of our students, it also helps demonstrate our strong commitment to a multicultural academic environment and improves the quality of learning for all students. However, the English department also recognizes that every year underserved students face barriers to graduate level college access; additional financial support in the form of scholarships, grants, and fellowships helps address these barriers. As a result, the MA in English program sought to develop the Gordon Parks Fellowship to help recruit and retain students from these underserved populations.

I was a student of color in this program, and while that posed its own set of unique challenges...I cannot imagine having gone anywhere else to obtain my degree...I'm wildly proud of my alma mater, and I hope to return there someday to teach.

Victoria Hendricks, 2018 MA in English Graduate

Further Information

Gordon Parks Fellowship Application Procedure

The Gordon Parks Fellowship is used to recruit and retain top applicants from underserved populations, providing financial support to students who might be otherwise unable to pursue further graduate instruction. The fellowship(s) will be awarded annually to a gradaute student(s) who identifies as a member of an underserved population and who is enrolled full or part time at Wichita State in the graduate program in English literature. Consideration will be given to academic merit and financial need. To apply, please fill out the WSU general scholarship/fellowship application found on the Financial Aid web page here and submit a short statement (maximum 500 words) on the importance of diversity to MA programs in English and/or Cultural Studies (please email the statement to the MA in English graduate coordinator). Interested students must adhere to the Fairmount College's LAS Scholarships deadline (typically February 1). For questions about the application procedure or the fellowship, please contact the Graduate Coordinator for the MA in English program, Dr. Rebeccah Bechtold (Rebeccah.Bechtold@wichita.edu).

On the MA in English Program

The MA program in English program offers a flexible course schedule and excels at preparing graduate students for a variety of professions. Our current curriculum regularly offers courses in British and American literature, major authors, genre studies, image literacy (film, graphic novels), publishing, teaching practicums, digital humanities, professional, technical, and scientific writing, linguistics, among others. We further work to target the changing career needs of our student body by providing an intensive research or applied learning experience through co-operative internships, research assistantships, and mentorship programs. Recent graduates have found success as media designers, high school teachers, PhD candidates, and community college faculty, among other career paths. For further information as well as additional financial assistantship opportunities, please visit our program's admission's page.

Information for Prospective Donors

If you are interested in making a contribution to the Gordon Parks Fellowship fund, please contact the Wichita State University Foundation.