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John E. Sawyer Fellowship

Named in honor of John E. “Jack” Sawyer, the former president of Williams College and pioneer in environmental studies, the John E. Sawyer fellowship has been awarded annually since 1999. As president at William, Sawyer revised the curriculum to include non-western studies, established the first center for environmental studies at the college level, increased the number of African American students, and expanded the recruitment of women and minorities for faculty and administration positions. Sawyer’s many honors included the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Chairman’s Award among others.

The Sawyer fellowship was endowed by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where Sawyer served as president from 1975 until his retirement in 1987. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and through their grants, build communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.

1999–2000	Jonathan M. Hess	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Colonizing Diaspora: Debating Jewish Emancipation in Germany, 1781–1815
2000–2001	Carla Hesse	University of California, Berkeley	The Law of the Terror
2001–2002	Patrick P. O’Neill	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Irish Cultural Influences on Anglo-Saxon England, 635–735
2002–2003	Paula A. Sanders	Rice University	Making Cairo Medieval
2003–2004	Eric G. Wilson	Wake Forest University	The Occult Current: A Romantic Poetics of Electricity
2004–2005	Deborah Harkness	University of Southern California	The Social Foundations of the Scientific Revolution: Science, Medicine, and Technology in Elizabethan London
2005–2006	Robert S. C. Gordon	University of Cambridge	The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2001
2006–2007	Connie Rosati	University of Arizona	Personal Good
2007–2008	Mary Ellis Gibson	University of North Carolina at Greensboro	Poetry on the Margins: English Language Literary Culture in India, 1780–1912
2008–2009	Francisca de Haan	Central European University	Cold War in the International Women’s Movement
2009–2010	Robert N. Swanson	University of Birmingham	The Parish in Late Medieval England: c1300–c1535
2010–2011	Maria Georgopoulou	American School of Classical Studies	Arts, Industry, and Trade in the Medieval Mediterranean
2011–2012	Laurie Langbauer	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Child Authors and Juvenilia: The Tradition in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
2012–2013	Catherine Higgs	University of Tennessee, Knoxville	Sisters for Justice: Religion and Political Transformation in Apartheid South Africa
2013–2014	Cindy Hahamovitch	College of William & Mary	Guestworkers, Governments, and the Global History of Human Trafficking
2014–2015	Gordon Jeffrey Love	Clemson University	The Black Square: Alexandre Kojeve’s Challenge to Philosophy
2015–2016	Michelle O’Malley	University of Sussex	Marketing the Renaissance Workshop
2016–2017	Miguel A. La Serna	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	The Last Revolution: Shining Path and the War of the End of the World
2017–2018	José d. Amador	Miami University	Transitioning in Brazil: Gender Policing, Trans Activism, and the Politics of Health
2018–2019	Meta DuEwa Jones	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Black Visionary Alchemy: How Poets & Artists Map Diaspora Memory
2019–2020	Shuang Shen	Pennsylvania State University	Cold War and Sinophone Literature at the Borders
2020–2021	Helmut Puff	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	The Time of the Antechamber: A History of Waiting (1500–1800)
2021–2022	Jane F. Thrailkill	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	The Agony of Empathy: A Health Humanities Intervention
2022–2023	Naomi Andre	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Writing Opera, Singing Blackness in the United States
2023–2024	Miriam Posner	University of California, Los Angeles	Seeing Like a Supply Chain: The Hidden Life of Logistics
2024–2025	Sarah M. Quesada	Duke University	The Untold South-South: Greater Mexico, African Decolonization, and Latin-African Solidarity (1956–2008)