The Phi Beta Kappa Society Announces 2025 Winner of the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship
WASHINGTON, DC – The Phi Beta Kappa Society has chosen Sophia Millman as the winner of the 2025 Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship. Established in 1934 by Isabelle Stone (ΦΒΚ, Wellesley College) in honor of her mother, this fellowship recognizes exceptional young scholars in the field of French or Greek language, literature, and culture.
Millman (ΦΒΚ, Hamilton College) is a doctoral candidate in French and fellow in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and cinema, also writing on feminist philosophy and cultural gerontology. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The French Review, Women in French Studies, La revue des lettres modernes, and French Studies Bulletin. She also serves as the book review editor at Simone de Beauvoir Studies.
Through the Sibley Fellowship, Millman will be awarded a stipend of $20,000 to support her project “Styles of Aging: The Later Lives and Last Works of Simone de Beauvoir, Agnès Varda, Maryse Condé, and Annie Ernaux.” Her project investigates how these four influential women writers and filmmakers crafted their final works and prepared to say goodbye to their audiences. She plans to conduct research in Guadeloupe and France, visiting archives and interviewing scholars, artists, and activists who are passionate about fighting ageism.
Millman intends to use her research findings to publish articles in literary and gerontological journals, design a seminar on late-life creativity, and ultimately write a scholarly monograph on feminist posterity.
Applications for the 2026 Sibley Fellowship will open in early fall 2025; the deadline is January 31, 2026.
Millman (ΦΒΚ, Hamilton College) is a doctoral candidate in French and fellow in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and cinema, also writing on feminist philosophy and cultural gerontology. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The French Review, Women in French Studies, La revue des lettres modernes, and French Studies Bulletin. She also serves as the book review editor at Simone de Beauvoir Studies.
Through the Sibley Fellowship, Millman will be awarded a stipend of $20,000 to support her project “Styles of Aging: The Later Lives and Last Works of Simone de Beauvoir, Agnès Varda, Maryse Condé, and Annie Ernaux.” Her project investigates how these four influential women writers and filmmakers crafted their final works and prepared to say goodbye to their audiences. She plans to conduct research in Guadeloupe and France, visiting archives and interviewing scholars, artists, and activists who are passionate about fighting ageism.
Millman intends to use her research findings to publish articles in literary and gerontological journals, design a seminar on late-life creativity, and ultimately write a scholarly monograph on feminist posterity.
Applications for the 2026 Sibley Fellowship will open in early fall 2025; the deadline is January 31, 2026.
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About The Phi Beta Kappa Society
Founded on Dec. 5, 1776, The Phi Beta Kappa Society is the nation's most prestigious academic honor society. It has chapters at over 290 colleges and universities in the United States, nearly 50 alumni associations, and more than half a million members worldwide. Noteworthy members include 17 U.S. Presidents, 42 U.S. Supreme Court Justices and more than 150 Nobel Laureates. The mission of The Phi Beta Kappa Society is to champion education in the liberal arts and sciences, foster freedom of thought, and recognize academic excellence. For more information, visit www.pbk.org.