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Fellows and Their Projects, 2015–2016
The Center annually welcomes up to forty scholars from all fields of the humanities. Individually, the Fellows pursue their own research and writing. Together, they create a stimulating intellectual community.
The National Humanities Center appointed 37 Fellows for the academic year 2015–16. These leading scholars come from 11 states, Australia, Germany, the People’s Republic of China, and the United Kingdom. Chosen from 537 applicants, they represent humanistic scholarship in anthropology, archaeology, art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, history, music, philosophy, and religious studies.
- Martin Berger
History of Art, University of California, Santa Cruz
Inventing Stereotype: Race, Art, and 1920s America
Archie K. Davis Fellowship - Reinhard Bernbeck
Archaeology, Freie Universität Berlin
Material Traces of Nazi Terror: Reflections on History, Experience, and Memory
William C. and Ida Friday Fellowship - Sara Bernstein
Philosophy, Duke University
What Might Have Been: Causation and Possibility
Philip L. Quinn Fellowship - Thomas Brown
History, University of South Carolina, Columbia
The Reconstruction of American Memory: Civic Monuments of the Civil War
Delta Delta Delta Fellowship
Public Lecture: “The Invention of the American Soldier Monument” - Peter J. Carroll
History, Northwestern University
“This Age of Suicide”: Modernity, Society, and Self in China, 1900–1957
Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship of the Research Triangle Foundation - Timothy Carter
Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Let ’Em Eat Cake: Political Musical Theater in 1930s America
Kent R. Mullikin Fellowship
Public Lecture: “Let ’Em Eat Cake: Political Musical Theater in 1930s America” - Nancy F. Cott
History, Harvard University
World-Venturing: Cosmopolitan Self-Invention after the Great War
Birkelund Fellowship - Judith B. Farquhar
Anthropology, University of Chicago
Gathering Medicine in the Mountains: Nation, Body, and Knowledge in China’s Ethnic South
NEH Fellowship
Public Lecture: “Institution and the Wild: Salvaging and Sorting Traditional Medicines in China” - Annegret Fauser
Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Politics of Musical Thought, 1918–1939
NEH Fellowship - Owen Flanagan
Philosophy, Duke University
The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility
Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship - Kate Flint
History of Art, University of Southern California
Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination
Allen W. Clowes Fellowship - Gregg Hecimovich
English, Winthrop University
The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Josephus Daniels Fellowship of the Research Triangle Foundation - James Hevia
History, University of Chicago
Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare
GlaxoSmithKline Fellowship - Anthony Kaye
History, Pennsylvania State University
Taking Canaan: Rethinking the Nat Turner Revolt
Robert F. and Margaret S. Goheen Fellowship - Norman Kutcher
History, Syracuse University
Eunuchs in the Age of China’s Last Great Emperors
Henry Luce Fellowship - Laura Lieber
Religious Studies, Duke University
Staging the Sacred: Orchestrating Holiness in Late Antiquity
Duke Endowment Fellowship - Beatrice Longuenesse
Philosophy, New York University
Self-Consciousness and the First Person
Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellowship - Colleen Lye
English, University of California, Berkeley
The Asian American Sixties
NEH Fellowship - April Masten
History, State University of New York–Stony Brook
Diamond and Juba: The Rise and Fall of Challenge Dancing in America
John G. Medlin, Jr. Fellowship
- Jane O. Newman
Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine
Auerbach’s Worlds: Early/Modern Mimesis between Religion and History
M. H. Abrams Fellowship - Daniel Nolan
Philosophy, Australian National University
Theoretical Virtues
William J. Bouwsma Fellowship - Akinwumi O. Ogundiran
History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Cultural History of the Atlantic Experience in the Yoruba Hinterland (West Africa), ca. 1550–1830
Delta Delta Delta Fellowship - Michelle O’Malley
History of Art, University of Sussex
Marketing the Renaissance Workshop
John E. Sawyer Fellowship - Paul Otto
History, George Fox University
Beads of Power: Wampum and the Shaping of Early America
NEH Fellowship - D. Mark Possanza
Classics, University of Pittsburgh
Fragmentary Republican Latin, vol. VIII, “Lyric, Elegiac and Hexameter Poetry,” a volume to be published in the Loeb Classical Library
Frank H. Kenan Fellowship - Janice Radway
English, Northwestern University
Girls and Their Zines in Motion: Selfhood and Sociality in the 1990s
Founders’ Fellowship
Public Lecture: “From the Underground to the Archive in Ten Years: Girl Zines, the 1990s, and the Challenge of Historical Narration” - Grant Ramsey
Philosophy, Independent Scholar
Toward a Unified Foundation for Evolutionary Theory
NEH Fellowship - Bill Schwarz
Cultural Studies, Queen Mary University of London
Complete two books coauthored with Stuart Hall: (1) The Politics of the Cultural Turn and (2) Politics and Culture in the Age of Neoliberalism
Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship - Daniel Scroop
History, University of Glasgow
The Politics of Scale in Modern American History
Walter Hines Page Fellowship of the Research Triangle Foundation - Neslihan Senocak
History, Columbia University
Care of Souls in Medieval Italy, 1050–1300
Fellows’ Fellowship - Biwu Shang
English, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Narrative Ethics in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Luce China Fellowship - Anfeng Sheng
Comparative Literature, Tsinghua University
National Assimilation and Cultural Resistance: A Study of Contemporary Amerindian Literature
Luce China Fellowship - Brenda Stevenson
History, University of California, Los Angeles
Fanny’s World of Women: Generations of Enslaved Black Females in North America, 1620–1860
John Hope Franklin Fellowship - Sharon Strocchia
History, Emory University
Cultures of Care: Women, Knowledge, and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy
Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Fellowship - Javier Villa-Flores
History, University of Illinois at Chicago
Perjurers, Impersonators, and Liars: Public Faith and the Dark Side of Trust in Eighteenth-Century Mexico
Hurford Family Fellowship - Judith Walkowitz
History, Johns Hopkins University
Feminism and Urban Space in London in the 1970s and 1980s
Donnelley Family Fellowship - Bing Zhou
History, Fudan University
What History Will Be: To Do History in a Digital Age
Luce China Fellowship
Resident Associates
- Marcus Bull
History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Eyewitness and Narration: Texts of Conflict and Cultural Encounter between the Eleventh and Sixteenth Centuries (Fall only) - J. Kameron Carter
Theology and Black Church Studies, Duke University Divinity School
God’s Property: Blackness and the Problem of Sovereignty - Carol Harrison
History, University of South Carolina
Writing Catholic Womanhood: Pauline Craven, 1808–1891 (Fall only) - Lynn Otto
English, George Fox University
Cast Off - David Pickell
Independent Writer
Komodo: Lessons from an Island and Its Dragons (Spring only)
- Julia Reid
English, University of Leeds, UK
“She Who Must be Obeyed”: Matriarchy in Victorian Anthropology and Literature - Jack M. Sasson
Judaic and Biblical Studies, Vanderbilt University
Judges 13–21, Yale Anchor Bible (Fall only) - John H. Smith
German, University of California, Irvine
Paradoxes and Metaphors of Infinity: Calculus in Modern German Thought (Sept, Dec, Spring only) - Daniel Walkowitz
History, New York University
Going Back: Jewish Heritage as Remembered, Forgotten, Imagined and Ignored