Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship | National Humanities Center

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Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship

The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the Center’s earliest supporters, established two fellowships upon the opening of the National Humanities Center in 1978. The Rockefeller Foundation is a private American foundation based in New York City. Established in 1913 by Standard Oil cofounder John D. Rockefeller, with his son John D. Rockefeller Jr., and business and philanthropic advisor Frederick Taylor Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation’s mission is to promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world.

1978–1979 Richard Dorson Indiana University The Other America in Legend
1978–1979 Perez Zagorin University of Rochester A Comparative Study of Revolution in Early Modern Europe
1978–1979 Elizabeth F. Flower University of Pennsylvania The Practical as a Philosophical Conception and Its Bases in American Thought
1978–1979 A. Hunter Dupree Brown University The Role of Measurement in History
1978–1979 Ann Douglas Columbia University Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and the Literary Life of New York in the 1920s
1978–1979 Carl Nordenfalk Nationalmuseum, Stockholm Rembrandt’s “The Oath of the Batavians”
1978–1979 Jacob Talmon Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century
1978–1979 William E. Leuchtenburg Columbia University FDR and the Supreme Court Crisis of the 1930s
1979–1980 Stephen Pyne U.S. Forest Service The Culture of Fire
1979–1980 Cynthia E. Russett Yale University Scientific Attempts to Define Gender Differences in England and America, 1860–1920
1979–1980 Yehoshua Arieli Hebrew University of Jerusalem History and Politics
1979–1980 Chaim Perelman University of Brussels, Belgium The Logic of Legal Reasoning
1979–1980 Paul Ricoeur University of Chicago The Narrative Function and the Human Experience of Time
1980–1981 James Olney North Carolina Central University Autobiography and Cultural Anthropology
1980–1981 Ralph Elliott Australian National University Thomas Hardy’s English: A Critical and Stylistic Analysis of the Language of His Poetry and Prose
1980–1981 Allen Ballard City College of New York The Emergence of the Black Middle Class—the Case of Philadelphia
1980–1981 Thomas R. Cripps Morgan State University A Social History of Blacks in American Film, 1942 to the Present
1980–1981 Sylvia Wynter Stanford University Uncle Tom Revisited—The Stock Characterization of the Negro in Western Literature
1980–1981 David Wills Amherst College Documentary History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1816–1916, and Afro-American Religious Thought
1981–1982 Harvey Gross State University of NY, Stony Brook The First Moment of the Modern: 1900–1914
1981–1982 Alvin I. Goldman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Epistemology and Cognitive Systems
1981–1982 Kejia Yuan Chinese Academy of Social Sciences A Study of Western Modernist Literature 
1982–1983 R. Douglas Porch Unviersity College of Wales The French Colonial Army, 1830–1962
1982–1983 Richard Bjornson Ohio State University Literature and National Identity in Cameroon
1982–1983 Houston Baker University of Pennsylvania Afro-American Narrative and the Anthropology of Art
1982–1983 Carl Wellman Washington University in St. Louis A General Theory of Rights
1982–1983 Harmon Smith Duke University The Development of Autonomous Moral Authority in American Christianity
1982–1983 Norman Sherry University of Lancaster, United Kingdom The Life and Work of Graham Greene
1983–1984 Lance Bertelsen University of Texas at Austin John Wilkes and the Popular Media
1983–1984 Martin Meisel Columbia University The Imagination of Chaos in Western Literature and Thought
1983–1984 David Levering Lewis University of California, San Diego Race to Fashoda: Ethiopia, Africa, and the Upper Nile, 1896–1899
1983–1984 Igal Kvart Hebrew University of Jerusalem Reference and Knowledge
1983–1984 Nayantara Shgal Unaffiliated A Man-Size Cloud (a novel) 
1986–1987 Lee Mitchell Princeton University Determined Fictions: The Excluded Self in American Literary Naturalism
1986–1987 Darlene Clark Hine Purdue University Black Women in White: A History of Black Women in the Nursing Profession, 1886–1950
1987–1988 Helen Ullrich Independent Scholar Cultural Study of Illness: A South India Perspective on Depression
1987–1988 Debora Shuger University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Hooker: A Study in Late Renaissance Thought 
1987–1988 William James Booth Duke University Masters and Servants: Reflections on Marxism and Its Origins 
1988–1989 Sarah Jane Deutsch Massachusetts Institute of Technology Women of Boston: Gender and the City, 1870–1950
1988–1989 Ewa Kuryluk Independent Scholar Veronica and Her Cloth: Origins, Tradition, and Symbolism of a “True” Icon
1989–1990 Harriet Guest University College, London Experienced Women: Religion and Femininity in 18th-Century Women’s Writing
1989–1990 Angelika Bammer Emory University Mother Tongues and Other Strangers: Discourses of Foreignness in Twentieth-Century Literature
1990–1991 Leon R. Fink University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill America’s “Missing” Social Democrats: Labor Intellectuals in the Progressive Era, 1890–1916
1990–1991 Anna K. Clark University of North Carolina, Charlotte Gender and the Making of the English Working Class
1991–1992 David L. Smith Williams College Racial Writing, Black and White
1991–1992 Eve K. Sedgwick Duke University Marriage Inside Out: Across Genders, Across Sexualities
1992–1993 Marianne Hirsch Dartmouth College Family Pictures: Photography and Narratives of Loss 
1992–1993 Katherine T. Bartlett Duke University Negotiating Tradition in Law: An Historicist Approach
1993–1994 Shepard Krech III Brown University The North American Indian: Ecologist, Conservationist, and Environmentalist?
1993–1994 Janet J. Ewald Duke University Crossing the Red Sea: Transport, Slavery, and Free Labor, 1800–1910
1994–1995 Toril Moi Duke University Materialist Feminism: New Perspectives on Feminist Theory 
1994–1995 Charles Capper University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Margaret Fuller: The Public Years
1995–1996 John David French Duke University The Metalworkers of ABC: Working Class Consciousness, Organization, and Ideology 
1995–1996 Mario Klarer University of Innsbruck, Austria Ekphrasis: Pictorial Description and Textual Self-Reflexivity in English and American Literature
1996–1997 George A. Chauncey University of Chicago American Culture and the Making of the Modern Gay World, 1935–1975 
1996–1997 Penny Von Eschen University of Iowa ‘Satchmo Blows Up the World’: Jazz, Race and Empire in the Age of the Cold War 
1997–1998 Susannah Heschel Case Western Reserve University When Jesus Was Aryan: Protestant Theologians in Nazi Germany
1997–1998 Karen Barkey Columbia University Divergent Paths to Nationhood in the Early Twentieth Century
1998–1999 Ashraf H. A. Rushdy Wesleyan University The Play of Race: Meditations on an American Institution
1998–1999 Mary Gluck Brown University The Aesthetics of “Low” Modernism: Typologies of the Avant-Garde Artist in Paris
1999–2000 Jerry Ward Tougaloo College Delta Narratives: Memory, Testimony, and Social Change (joint project with Dr. Kim Rogers)
1999–2000 Kim Lacy Rogers Dickinson College Delta Narratives: Memory, Testimony, and Social Change (joint project with Dr. Jerry Ward)
2000–2001 Kenneth Janken University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Mr. N Double-A C P: The Life of Walter White, 1893–1955
2000–2001 Haile M. Larebo Morehouse College Church, State and Society in Ethiopia, 1885–1995 
2001–2002 Winifred Breines Northeastern University The Trouble Between Us: White Women, Black Women, The Movement Years
2001–2002 Bettye Collier-Thomas Temple University “She Hath Done What She Could”: African American Women & Religion
2002–2003 Ginger S. Frost Samford University ”As Husband and Wife”: Cohabitation in Nineteenth-Century England
2002–2003 Faith Lois Smirh Brandeis University Making Modern Subjects: Cultural and Intellectual Formation, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, 1880–1910 
2003–2004 P. Gabrielle Foreman Occidental College Reading Miscegenation and Homoerotics in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Slavery Literature and Culture 
2003–2004 Elizabeth L. Kennedy University of Arizona Many Strands, One Woman: Lesbianism, Marriage, and Sexuality in an Upper-Class Life
2004–2005 Peter H. Sigal California State University, Los Angeles The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality in Early Nahua Culture and Society
2004–2005 Phyllis W. Hunter University of North Carolina, Greensboro Geographies of Capitalism: Imagining Asia in Early America
2005–2006 Lochlann Jain Stanford University Commodity Violence: American Automobility
2005–2006 Kyeong-Hee Choi University of Chicago Rewritten in Divided Korea: Colonial Literature as a History, 1945–1960 
2006–2007 Francesca M. Bordogna Northwestern University Traveling Philosophers: The Constitution of an International Pragmatist Network, 1890–1920
2006–2007 Randal M. Jelks Calvin College Benjamin Elijah Mays, a Religious Rebel in the Jim Crow South: An Intellectual Biography
2007–2008 Kate Flint Rutgers University Writing and Photography
2007–2008 Laura F. Edwards Duke University The People and Their Peace: The Re-Constitution of Governance in the American South, 1787–1840
2008–2009 Steven Lee Rubenstein University of Liverpool, United Kingdom Shuar Women as Agents of Political Discourse and Practice 
2008–2009 Joao Jose Reis Federal University of Bahia, Brazil Ganhadores: Street Labor in Nineteenth-Century Bahia, Brazil 
2009–2010 Ana Mariella Bacigalupo State University of NY, Buffalo Shamanic Memory and Historical Consciousness: The Making of Francisca Colipe and Her Mapuche Community in Chile
2009–2010 Ellen Frances Stroud Bryn Mawr College Dead As Dirt: An Environmental History of the Dead Body
2010–2011 Paul Berliner Duke University Biographies of Mbira Maestro Magaya and Jazz Prodigy Booker Little
2010–2011 Miguel Tamen University of Lisbon, Portugal The Alice Books: An Introduction to Literature and the Arts
2011–2012 Sandye Hewamanne Wake Forest University Sri Lanka’s Former Global Factory Workers Negotiating New Lives
2011–2012 Ellen Ross Ramapo College of New Jersey Missionaries, Philanthropists and “Valiant Warrior Queens”: From Social Work to Social Activism in Britain, 1914–1950
2012–2013 Jairo Moreno University of Pennsylvania Syncopated Modernities: Musical Latin-Americanisms in the U.S., 1978–2008
2012–2013 Linda Rupert University of North Carolina, Greensboro Inter-Colonial Marronage, Colonial Policy, and Imperial Jurisdiction in the Early Modern Caribbean
2013–2014 Julie Greene University of Maryland The Wages of Empire: Labor, Race, and U.S. Expansionism, 1865 to 1920
2013–2014 Stephen J. Shoemaker University of Oregon The Apocryphal Mary: The Hidden History of Early Christian Devotion to the Mother of Jesus
2014–2015 Barbara Boyd Bowdoin College Ovid’s Homer: Tradition, Authority, and Epic Reception
2014–2015 Mark Hansen Duke University Feed Forward:  On the “Future” of 21st Century Media
2015–2016 Owen Flanagan Duke University The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibilities
2015–2016 Bill Schwarz Queen Mary, University of London (1) The Politics of the Cultural Turn
(2) Politics and Culture in the Age of Neoliberalism
2016–2017 Nicholas Harkness Harvard University A Semiotics of Intensity: Glossolalia, Collective Prayer, and South Korean Social Life
2016–2017 Phillip Horky Durham University, United Kingdom Pythagorean Philosophy: 250 BCE to 200 CE
2017–2018 Peter Galison Harvard University Contested Visibilities and the Anthropogenic Image
2017–2018 John McGowan University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Comedy/Comity: Resources for Civility
2018–2019 Mia Fuller University of California, Berkeley Mussolini Threshing Still: Inertia Memoriae, Italy, and Fascist Monuments
2018–2019 Rebecca Goetz New York University Captive Archipelagos: Native Enslavement in the Greater Caribbean, 1492–1792
2019–2020 Michele Lamprakos University of Maryland Memento Mauri: The After Life of the Great Mosque of Córdoba
2019–2020 Martha Rust New York University Item: Lists and the Poetics of Reckoning in Late Medieval England
2020–2021 Bryna Goodman University of Oregon Finance and Fortune: Economics, Calculation, and the Fate of the Chinese Republic
2020–2021 Adriane Lentz-Smith Duke University The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights
2021–2022 Barbara Kowalzig New York University Gods around the Pond: Religion, Society and the Sea in the Early Mediterranean Economy
2021–2022 Brenna M. Munro University of Miami Queer Writing in Digital Times: The Mobile Nigerian Present
2022–2023 Tiffany Willoughby-Herard University of California, Irvine “I Meant for You to be Free”: Winnie Mandela’s Love Letter to and Pedagogies for Young South Africans, the Post-1994 Generation
2023–2024 E.K. Tan Stony Brook University Queer Homecoming: Translocal Remapping of Sinophone Kinship
2024–2025 Mark Cruse Arizona State University From Alexander the Great to Tamerlane: World Dominion in the Medieval French Imagination