Frank Hawkins Kenan Fellowship | National Humanities Center

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Frank Hawkins Kenan Fellowship

Established to honor businessman and philanthropist Frank Hawkins Kenan, the Kenan fellowship has been awarded annually to a humanities scholar since 1995. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1935, Kenan bought a Durham-based oil distributor and established the Tops Petroleum service stations, which transitioned into Kenan Transport. Kenan was also one of the original directors of the Research Triangle Park, which was conceived to attract and retain research-based industries that would hire graduates of the area universities.

As a trustee of the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust, Kenan was committed to fueling local economic development and advancing higher education and the arts through his generous philanthropy, which led him to endow the fellowship at the Center prior to his death. Further, he established a separate fund to establish a research and teaching program focused on private enterprise. This later became the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC’s business school, which later became the Kenan-Flagler Business School.

1995–1996 Robert O. Keohane Harvard University Contested Commitments in United States Foreign Policy
1997–1998 Daniel W. Patterson University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cultural Interpretation of 19th-Century Scotch-Irish Gravestones in the Carolina Piedmont
1998–1999 Jonathan A. Bush Santa Clara University The American Nuremberg Trials, 1946–1949
1999–2000 Thomas Christiano University of Arizona Philosophical Foundations of Democracy
2000–2001 Paul Weithman University of Notre Dame Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship
2001–2002 Bernard Gert Dartmouth College Hobbes and Human Nature
2002–2003 Paul Griffiths Iowa State University Petty Crime, Policing, and Punishment in London, 1545–1660
2003–2004 Lewis Erenberg Loyola University Chicago Louis v. Schmeling: Boxing, Race, and Nationalism, 1930s–1950s
2004–2005 Tony Day Independent scholar Forms of Reality: Literature in Java, 1800–2000
2005–2006 Cynthia Herrup University of Southern California “When Mercy Seasons Justice”: Pardons and the Constitution in Early Modern England
2006–2007 Jann Pasler University of California, San Diego Music, Race, and Colonialism in Fin-de-siècle France
2007–2008 Paul Werth University of Nevada, Las Vegas Arbiters of the Sacred: Religious Toleration and the Civil Order in Imperial Russia
2008–2009 Michael G. Wood Princeton University Proust’s Affair: Fantasies and Fictions of the Dreyfus Case
2009–2010 Bart Ehrman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Literary Forgery and Counter-Forgery in the Early Christian Tradition
2010–2011 Behnam Sadeghi Stanford University Women in the Public Space: Evolution of Ideas in the First 150 Years of Islam
2011–2012 Laurie Paul University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A Common Cause: A Unified Account of Causation and Causal Reasoning
2012–2013 Andrew Cayton Miami University Imperial America: 1672–1764
2013–2014 Jocelyn Olcott Duke University “The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History”: The 1975 International Women’s Year Conference and the Challenges of Transnational Feminism
2014–2015 Noah Heringman University of Missouri, Columbia Deep Time and the Prehistoric Turn
2015–2016 Mark Possanza University of Pittsburgh Fragmentary Republican Latin, vo. VIII, “Lyric, Elegiac and Hexameter Poetry”
2016–2017 Sebastián P. Carassai University of Buenos Aires Eclipsed Histories: The Sixties and Seventies in Argentina from a Microhistorical Perpective
2017–2018 Elizabeth Otto University at Buffalo, State University of New York Haunted Bauhaus
2018–2019 Franziska Seraphim Boston College Geographics of Justice: Japan, Germany, and the Allied War Crimes Program
2019–2020 Chérie Ndaliko University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Archival Mutations: Decomposing Aesthetics of Atrocity in Congo
2020–2021 Emily Baragwanath University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Xenophon’s Women
2021–2022 Kelly S. McDonough The University of Texas at Austin Indigenous Science and Technologies: Nahuas and the World around Them
2022–2023 Molly Todd Montana State University Pictures of Conscience: Central American Refugees and International Human Rights Campaigns, 1979–2019
2023–2024 Tom Johnson University of York The Reckoners: Economic Life in a Fifteenth-Century Fishing Village
2024–2025 John Wood Sweet University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The Captive’s Tale: Venture Smith and the African Roots of the American Republic