Birkelund Senior Fellowship | National Humanities Center

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Birkelund Senior Fellowship

The Birkelund Senior Fellowship was endowed by John P. Birkelund, an investment executive and former director of the New York Stock Exchange. It has been awarded annually since 1999 to exceptional scholars from many disciplines, including historians, literary theorists, and philosophers.

While chairman of the board of trustees of the National Humanities Center from 1996–2004, Birkelund’s leadership propelled the success of the Center’s first major capital campaign, raising over $22 million and providing sixteen endowed fellowships for scholars in three years. Birkelund’s work as a trustee of other educational institutions focused on education and the interplay of history, diplomacy, policy and culture. He was, himself, an accomplished historian and wrote a biography of Gustav Stresemann, Chancellor and Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic. Birkelund’s continued dedication to the academic community was recognized when he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Science.

1999–2000 Robert D. Richardson, Jr. Wesleyan University An Intellectual Biography of William James
2000–2001 Thomas W. Laqueur University of California, Berkeley Death, Memory, and Modernity
2001–2002 Thomas A. Brady University of California, Berkeley German Histories in the Age of Reform
2002–2003 Bernard M.J. Wasserstein University of Glasgow Krakowiec: Jews and Their Neighbors in a Small Town in Eastern Galicia, 1772–1946
2003–2004 Randolph Starn University of California, Berkeley Authenticating the Past: Archives, Museums, Libraries
2004–2005 Roger Chickering Georgetown University Total War in a Lovely Place: A Cultural History of Freiburg, 1914–1918
2005–2006 Martin Jay University of California, Berkeley The Ambivalent Virtues of Mendacity: Lying in Politics
2006–2007 Christopher Browning University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Remembering Survival: The Factory Slave Camps of Starachowice, Poland
2007–2008 Nigel Smith Princeton University The State and Literary Production, c. 1500–c.1700
2008–2009 Thomas L. Haskell Rice University Sensibility and Moral Capital in Abolishing the Slave Trade
2009–2010 Kit Fine New York University Metaphysics of Material Things
2010–2011 Dane Kennedy George Washington University Mapping Continents: British Exploration of Africa and Australia
2011–2012 Martin J. Weiner Rice University Liberalism and the British Empire
2012–2013 Stefan Collini University of Cambridge Nostalgic Imagination: Literary Criticism in English Culture
2013–2014 Harvey J. Graff Ohio State University Undiciplining Knowledge: Pursuing the Dream of Interdisciplarity in the Twentieth Century, A Social History
2014 William Newman Indiana University, Bloomington The Alchemy of Isaac Newton—A New Appraisal
2015 Derek Attridge University of York Poetry in Performance from Home to the Renaissance: The Middle Ages
2015–2016 Nancy Cott Harvard University World-Venturing: Cosmopolitan Self-Invention after the Great War
2016–2017 Annabel Wharton Duke University Manipulating Models: Diagnostic, Phenomenal, Architectural
2017–2018 Tera Hunter Princeton University The African American Marriage Gap in the Twentieth Century
2018–2019 Matthew Rubery Queen Mary University of London Reader’s Block: Testimonies of Neurological Reading Disorders
2019–2020 Giuseppe Gerbino Columbia University Music and Mind in the Renaissance
2020–2021 Jordynn Jack University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Training the Brain: Rhetoric, Neuropolicy, and Education
2021–2022 Lorraine Daston University of Chicago Science Goes Global
2022–2023 Brian Lewis McGill University Greek to the Soul: George Ives and Homosexuality from Wilde to Wolfenden
2023–2024 Oleg Budnitskii HSE University, Moscow “The Red Army is Not Ideal”: Soviet Soldiers’ Violence Against Civilians, 1939–1947
2024–2025 Julia A. King St. Mary’s College of Maryland Land as Archive: An Indigenous Landscape History of the Rappahannock People of Tidewater Virginia