John G. Medlin Jr. Fellowship | National Humanities Center

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John G. Medlin Jr. Fellowship

Honoring one of the Center’s most important leaders, the John G. Medlin Jr. fellowship has been awarded annually to scholars affiliated with liberal arts colleges since 2000. Medlin is most well known for expanding the relatively small Wachovia Bank into one of the largest financial companies in the South. Medlin received several accolades during his successful banking career, including the American Banker Award as the most admired CEO in banking as well as the American Banker Lifetime Achievement Award. He also served as a trustee of the Center for many years and helped lead its first capital campaign to endow NHC fellowships.

The John G. Medlin Jr. fellowship was originally endowed by Medlin’s longtime friend and fellow banker, C. D. Spangler, who led the merger of Bank of North Carolina and North Carolina National Bank Corporation, forming NationsBank, now Bank of America. Additional funding was awarded in 2016 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the largest supporters of the arts and humanities in the United States.

2001–2002 Allen Buchanan University of Arizona Humanitarian Intervention, Ethics, and the Rule of Law
2002–2003 Lloyd S. Kramer University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Traveling to Unknown Places: Politics, Religion, and the Cultural Identities of Expatriate Writers, 1780–1960
2003–2004 James L. Peacock University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Exploring Identity in the Global South
2004–2005 Georgia C. Warnke University of California, Riverside After Sex: A Hermeneutics of Race and Gender, Color and Sex
2005–2006 Gerald Postema University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The Discipline of Common Reason
2006–2007 Joseph Viscomi University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In the Caves of Heaven and Hell
2007–2008 Heather A. Williams University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Information Wanted: Separation and Reunification of African American Families
2008–2009 Mary Floyd-Wilson University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Preternatural Passions: Occult Mentalities and the Everyday in English Renaissance Drama
2009–2010 John Kasson University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
2010–2011 Fred S. Naiden University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Smoke Signals for the Gods
2011–2012 Karen Hagemann University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Revisiting Prussia’s Wars Against Napoleon: War, Culture, Memory
2012–2013 Donald M. Reid University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The Factory is Where the Workers Are: Constructing Democracy and Community Chez Lip
2013–2014 Andrew J. Jewett Harvard University Science and Religion: Toward a Political History of Postwar American Thought
2014–2015 Christopher Melchert University of Oxford The Early History of Islamic Ascetism
2015–2016 April Masten State University of New York, Stony Brook Diamond and Juba: The Rise and Fall of Challenge Dancing in America
2016–2017 Kim Hall Barnard College “Othello was my grandfather”: Race and Shakespeare in the African Diaspora
2017–2018 Laura Murphy Loyola University New Orleans The New Slave Narrative
2018–2019 Anton Matytsin Kenyon College A History of History: The Académie des inscriptions and the Remaking of the Past
2019–2020 Simon Middleton College of William & Mary The Price of the People: Money and Power in Early America
2020–2021 Saundra Weddle Drury University Architecture, Mobility, Segregation: The Everyday Spatial Practices of Women in Early Modern Venice
2021–2022 Vance Byrd Grinnell College Listening to Panoramas: Sonic and Visual Cultures of Commemoration
2022–2023 Elena Machado Sáez Bucknell University Staging Activism in US Latinx Theater
2023–2024 David M. Robinson Colgate University Ability and Difference in Early Modern China
2024–2025 Aaron Kamugisha Smith College Bewildering Coloniality: Austin Clarke and the Twentieth Century Black Atlantic World