Fellows and Their Projects, 2017–2018 | National Humanities Center

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Fellows and Their Projects, 2017–2018

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 34 Fellows for the academic year 2017–18. These leading scholars come to the Center from 14 states, Greece, and the United Kingdom. Chosen from 630 applicants, they represent humanistic scholarship in African American studies; anthropology; art history; Asian Studies; comparative literature; East Asian languages and literature; English language and literature; environmental studies; European languages and literature; history; history of science; medieval studies; music history and musicology; philosophy; religion; sociology; South Asian studies; and theater, dance, and performance studies. Each Fellow will work on an individual research project and will have the opportunity to share ideas in seminars, lectures, and conferences at the Center.
NHC Fellows
  • Caroline Jones
    Art History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    Contested Visibilities and the Anthropogenic Image
    Henry Luce Fellowship
  • Pavlos Kontos
    Philosophy, University of Patras
    Spectators of Moral Matters in Aristotle
    William J. Bouwsma Fellowship
  • Emily Levine
    History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
    Exceptional Institutions: Cities, Capital, and the Rise of the Research University
    Robert F. and Margaret S. Goheen Fellowship
  • John McGowan
    English Language and Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    Comedy/Comity: Resources for Civility
    Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship
    Podcast: “From Comedy to Comity: How Comic Literature Can Guide Us Toward a More Civil Society”
  • Laura Murphy
    English Language and Literature, Loyola University New Orleans
    The New Slave Narrative
    John G. Medlin, Jr. Fellowship
    Conversations with Scholars: “Understanding Modern Slavery”
    Podcast: “Modern Slave Narratives”
  • Todd Ochoa
    Religion, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    Conjecture for a Bembé: Religious Recombination in the Black Atlantic
    Delta Delta Delta Fellowship
    Conversations with Scholars: “Sorcery, Celebration, and Religious Life in Rural Cuba”
  • Elizabeth Otto
    Art History, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
    Haunted Bauhaus
    Frank H. Kenan Fellowship
    Podcast: “Bauhaus, Revisited: Complicating the Legacy of the German Art School”
  • Sara Poor
    Medieval Studies, Princeton University
    Telling Tales of Clever Women: Authorship and the Devotional Book in Late Medieval Germany
    NEH Fellowship; Josephus Daniels Fellowship of the Research Triangle Foundation
  • Ann Reynolds
    Art History, University of Texas at Austin
    In Our Time
    Allen W. Clowes Fellowship
  • Hollis Robbins
    African American Studies, Johns Hopkins University
    Forms of Contention: The African American Sonnet Tradition
    Delta Delta Delta Fellowship
    Humanities Moment: “Finding Freedom From the Familiar”
    Podcast: “The Double-Voiced Form: The African American Sonnet Tradition”
  • Mab Segrest
    History, Connecticut College
    Administrations of Lunacy: Race, Psychiatry, and Georgia’s State Hospital
    NHC Fellowship
    Humanities Moment: “Sometimes You Just Need to Keep Reading”
    Podcast: “A Metahistory of Suffering: Race, Lunacy, and Psychiatry in Milledgeville, Georgia”
  • Harleen Singh
    South Asian Studies, Brandeis University
    Half an Independence: Women, Violence, and Modern Lives in India
    ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship
    Conversations with Scholars: “Women, Violence, and Culture in Contemporary India”
  • John H. Smith
    European Languages and Literature, University of California, Irvine
    How Infinity Came to Be at Home in the World: Metaphors and Paradoxes of Mathematics in German Thought and Literature, 1675–1830
    William C. and Ida Friday Fellowship
    Podcast: “Infinity and Beyond: How One Concept Reshaped Our Understanding of the World”
  • Shahla Talebi
    Anthropology, Arizona State University
    The Living Monuments of Mourning: Contested Martyrdoms in Post-Revolutionary Iran
    Anthony E. Kaye Fellowship
  • Rian Thum
    Asian Studies, Loyola University New Orleans
    Islamic China
    Trustees’ Fellowship
  • Robin Visser
    East Asian Languages and Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    Bordering Chinese Eco-Literatures (1984–2014)
    NEH Fellowship; Walter Hines Page Fellowship of the Research Triangle Foundation
  • Andreá Williams
    English Language and Literature, The Ohio State University
    Unmarried Miss-fits: Single Women and Twentieth-Century Black Culture
    ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship
    Public Lecture: “African American Marriage in the Twentieth Century: A Conversation”

Resident Associates

  • David Cory
    Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
    Redrawing the Boundary of the Physical: Medieval Approaches to Living Organisms
  • Hilde Hoogenboom
    Russian Studies, Arizona State University
    Noble Rot: Corruption, Civil Society, and Literary Elites in Russia
  • Avinash Singh
    History, Brandeis University
    Sovereign, State, and Self: Sikhs and the Politics of Religion in Twentieth-Century India
  • John Wilkinson
    English, University of Chicago
    Abstraction, Landscape and Communication