Program

Research Programs: Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions

Period of Performance

1/1/2022 - 6/30/2025

Funding Totals

$390,000.00 (approved)
$390,000.00 (awarded)


Long-term Research Fellowships at the National Humanities Center

FAIN: RA-278144-21

National Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-0152)
Matthew Booker (Project Director: August 2020 to June 2024)
Martha M. Kelly (Project Director: June 2024 to present)

26 months of stipend support (3 fellowships) per year for three years.

The National Humanities Center, an independent center exclusively devoted to advanced humanities research, seeks three nine-month fellowships for the next three-year cycle (grant period January 1, 2022 - June 30, 2025). Since 1978, the NEH has generously supported NHC fellowships during each granting cycle. Designated "NEH Fellows," recipients of these awards are chosen through a rigorous vetting process and join a vibrant intellectual community of 30-40 total Fellows. Each works on a major research project throughout the academic year with significant support from our library staff and scholarly programs office. End-of-year evaluations from the roughly 1,500 Fellows who have been in residence generally describe their year at the NHC as the most inspiring and productive of their careers. The NHC focuses attention to diversity in all of its dimensions so that Fellows represent a broad range of disciplines, institutions, backgrounds, and perspectives.





Associated Products

Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (Book)
Title: Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Author: William Craft Brumfield
Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, the photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a quest to document an empire that was undergoing rapid change due to industrialization and the building of railroads. Between 1903 and 1916 Prokudin-Gorsky, who developed a pioneering method of capturing color images on glass plates, scoured the Russian Empire with the patronage of Nicholas II. Intrepidly carrying his cumbersome and awkward camera from the western borderlands over the Volga River to Siberia and central Asia, he created a singular record of Imperial Russia. In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an increasingly chaotic, violent Russia and regained nearly 2,000 of his bulky glass negatives. His subsequent peripatetic existence before settling in Paris makes his collection's survival all the more miraculous. The U.S. Library of Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky's collection in 1948, and since then it has become a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary Russia. Now digitized and publicly available, his images are a sensation in Russia, where people visit websites dedicated to them. William Craft Brumfield—photographer, scholar, and the leading authority on Russian architecture in the West—began working with Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs in 1985. He curated the first public exhibition of them in the United States and has annotated the entire collection. In Journeys through the Russian Empire, Brumfield—who has spent decades traversing Russia and photographing buildings and landscapes in their various stages of disintegration or restoration—juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky's images against those he took of the same buildings and areas. In examining the intersections between his own photography and that of Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of Russia's architectural heritage and calls into question the nostalgic assumptions of those who see Prokudin-Gorsky's images as the recovery of the lost past of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia. This lavishly ill
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/journeys-through-the-russian-empire
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph

Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court (Book)
Title: Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court
Author: Armand Derfner
Author: Orville Vernon Burton
Abstract: In the first comprehensive accounting of the U.S. Supreme Court’s race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice. The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice. From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court’s race record—a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century Reconstruction Amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights. Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court’s race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving America’s racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justices’ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings. We learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history also reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the country’s promise of equal rights for all.
Year: 2021
Publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

South Asian Sovereignty: The Conundrum of Worldly Power (Book)
Title: South Asian Sovereignty: The Conundrum of Worldly Power
Editor: Arild Engelsen Ruud
Editor: David Gilmartin
Editor: Pamela Price
Abstract: This book brings ethnographies of everyday power and ritual into dialogue with intellectual studies of theology and political theory. It underscores the importance of academic collaboration between scholars of religion, anthropology, and history in uncovering the structures of thinking and action that make politics work. The volume weaves important discussions around sovereignty in modern South Asian history with debates elsewhere on the world map. South Asia’s colonial history – especially India’s twentieth-century emergence as the world’s largest democracy – has made the subcontinent a critical arena for thinking about how transformations and continuities in conceptions of sovereignty provide a vital frame for tracking shifts in political order. The chapters deal with themes such as sovereignty, kingship, democracy, governance, reason, people, nation, colonialism, rule of law, courts, autonomy, and authority, especially within the context of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in politics, ideology, religion, sociology, history, and political culture, as well as the informed reader interested in South Asian studies.
Year: 2020
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Edited Volume

The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic (Book)
Title: The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic
Author: Bryna Goodman
Abstract: A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of democratic visions in China’s troubled Republic in the early 1920s. On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her U.S.-educated employer, Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial. In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists, reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems. Xi’s family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred further controversy. The creation of a republic ten years earlier had inspired a vision of popular sovereignty and citizenship premised upon gender equality and legal reform. After the quick suppression of the first Chinese parliament, commercial circles took up the banner of democracy in their pursuit of wealth. But, Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated “new woman” exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city. In the shadow of economic crisis, Tang’s trial also exposed the frailty of legal mechanisms in a political landscape fragmented by warlords and enclaves of foreign colonial rule. The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China’s early passage through democratic populism, in an ill-fated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen’s rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.
Year: 2021
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph

Gender Bonds, Gender Binds: Women, Men, and Family in Middle High German Literature (Book)
Title: Gender Bonds, Gender Binds: Women, Men, and Family in Middle High German Literature
Editor: Sara S. Poor
Abstract: While Gender Studies has made its mark on literary studies, much scholarship on the German Middle Ages is largely inaccessible to the Anglo-American audience. With gender at its core as a category of analysis, "Gender Bonds, Gender Binds"uniquely opens up medieval German material to English speakers. Recognizing the impact of Ann Marie Rasmussen’s Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature, this transatlantic volume expands on questions introduced in her 1997 book and subsequent work. More than a mere tribute, the collection moves the debates forward in new directions: it examines how gender bonds together people, practices, texts, and interpretive traditions, while constraining and delimiting these things socially, ideologically, culturally, or historically. As the contributions demonstrate, a close, materially focused analysis produces complex results, not easily reduced to a platitude. The essays steer a firm course through the terrain of gender bonds and binds, many of which remain challenging in the present. Herein lies the broader reach of this volume, for understanding the longevity of patriarchy and its effects on human relations demonstrates how crucial the study of the past can be for us as a society today.
Year: 2021
Publisher: De Gruyter
Type: Edited Volume

The Names of the Python Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930 (Book)
Title: The Names of the Python Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930
Author: David L. Schoenbrun
Abstract: Systems of belonging, including ethnicity, are not static, automatic, or free of contest. Historical contexts shape the ways which we are included in or excluded from specific classifications. Building on an amazing array of sources, David L. Schoenbrun examines groupwork—the imaginative labor that people do to constitute themselves as communities—in an iconic and influential region in East Africa. His study traces the roots of nationhood in the Ganda state over the course of a millennia, demonstrating that the earliest clans were based not on political identity or language but on shared investments, knowledges, and practices. Grounded in Schoenbrun's skillful mastery of historical linguistics and vernacular texts, The Names of the Python supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in ex-colonial Africa and beyond. This timely volume carefully distinguishes past from present and shows the many possibilities that still exist for the creative cultural imagination.
Year: 2021
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Type: Single author monograph

Los wounaan y la construción del paisaje: identidad, arte y gobernanza ambiental en la frontera Panamá-Colombia (Book)
Title: Los wounaan y la construción del paisaje: identidad, arte y gobernanza ambiental en la frontera Panamá-Colombia
Author: Julie Velásquez Runk
Abstract: The Darién region, on the border between Panama and Colombia, is a name that many conservationists know. Known for its lowland tropical forests, its fame is all the greater because a highway that should be there isn't: environmentalists have repeatedly and astonishingly stopped attempts to connect the continents via the Inter-American highway. This void also serves to occlude the history of the region, as the mature forest gives the wrong impression of a nature without people. In The wounaan and the construction of their landscape, Julia Velásquez Runk reverses persistent assumptions about the people who call the Darién home; in its pages it demonstrates the agency of the wounaan people to earn a living and to conserve and transform in the face of great and continuous change. The author focuses on creation and construction as capacities of the Wounaan to subtly effect changes that have given them resistance in a dynamic and globalized age. She theorizes that unpredictable landscapes, political decisions, and cultural beliefs are responsible for environmental conservation problems, and she makes visible environmental governance efforts that illustrate what happens when conservation confronts people in a supposedly uninhabited place. . The everyday dangers of environmental governance without local construction include logging,The wounaan and the construction of their landscape show us local ways of knowing and being in the world that may be key to the future of conservation.
Year: 2020
Publisher: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia
Type: Single author monograph

Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem (Book)
Title: Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem
Author: Jennifer L. Fleissner
Abstract: Western modernity rests on the notion of individual will, of the autonomous subject able to chart a path toward self-determination. Yet today that notion seems neither plausible nor desirable, in part because of the ways that novels have long questioned it. The novel typically takes the will as a site of insufficiency or excess-from obsession to indecision, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner's ambitious book shows how the novel's attention to these maladies of the will has made it a form of ongoing interrogation, both invested and critical, of modernity's core premises from within. Fleissner ranges from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth, showing how the novel participated in conversations around the topic of will that reached across theology, moral and political philosophy, medicine, criminology, and the nascent social sciences. While taking its place beside other major works in the theory of the novel, it departs from them in its focus on the often more philosophically minded American novel-both canonical instances like Hawthorne and James, and important, still insufficiently recognized voices like those of Elizabeth Stoddard and Charles W. Chesnutt. Fleissner recovers a long tradition, for which the novel is central, of understanding the will not as a problem to overcome but as one which we have no choice but to continue to think through,
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://worldcat.org/title/1304337958
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226822013

A Place at the End of a Road: A Yin-Yang Geography (Article)
Title: A Place at the End of a Road: A Yin-Yang Geography
Author: Marshall Kramer.
Author: Judith Farquhar
Author: Lili Lai
Abstract: If one task of modern nation-states is to produce a commons or a known universe, a one-world world that is visible to all, what spaces are left for the uncommons? Drawing on a 2014 visit to a village, once a county town, just barely within the borders of China, we follow James Scott in asking not only how a state sees but what a state might be able to see, as well. To understand the uncanny (in)visibility of this place, we invoke Chinese yin-yang theory to reflect on the ways that human space transforms through time, partly hidden by yin shade and partly revealed in yang glare. The uncommons is not, in other words, an exterior to the one-world world; rather, it is a possible world that can make itself partly known in a mottled and ever-changing light and shade.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://worldcat.org/title/7211014470
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Anthropologica

You Had to Have Been There: Laughing at Lunch about the Chinese Dream (Article)
Title: You Had to Have Been There: Laughing at Lunch about the Chinese Dream
Author: Judith Farquhar
Abstract: Do the comedians in the Chinese Communist Party propaganda apparatus get the joke? Do they see the ludicrousness of the situation in which self-evident core values are proposed as a shared dream for everyone? The general impression is that they do not. Perhaps they are not in a structural position to share the laughter of the people. Classically in China, the sovereign is not allowed to joke.28 Where the lord’s word is law, it would not do for him do to engage in wordplay or paradoxical foolishness. The fact that modern leaders of fractious republics famously do so—Mao’s witticisms are different from but not less clever than those of John Kennedy or Barack Obama—must be an index of the modernity of power in nation-states. Jokes bubble up at all levels in the everyday life of state power in China, as they do in other modern nation-states. The murmur of billions of sarcastic text messages, so many of which twist and challenge the proprieties of power, persuades us that the premodern imperium is no more. The system of cosmo-political lordship for which every imperial word was a decree and which tabooed the names of the sacred powerful is long gone. In the People’s Republic of China, a very secular sovereignty addresses the multitude; it recognizes, relies upon, and thus disciplines the many modes of existence of the consumers of state communications. Unlike the provincial rube in the men’s room, the people insist on some carnal necessities, and when the message fails to connect with actual life, they simply forget to consume it. But that leaves us with a truly puzzling question: why is the Propaganda Ministry so humorless, why are its cute dreaming babies so flat-footed? If we could answer this question, reading the state agenda expressed in a media environment through the ephemeral laughter of the public, we might draw closer to an understanding of how contemporary sovereignty works. To adapt a common Chinese saying, in the people’s laughter we might discern the stat
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://worldcat.org/title/6932189232
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Critical Inquiry

Guido Adler and the Founding of the International Musicological Society (IMS): A View from the Archives (Article)
Title: Guido Adler and the Founding of the International Musicological Society (IMS): A View from the Archives
Author: Annegret Fauser
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2019
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Vremennik Zubovskogo Instituta

Imperialist Substitutions: Commemorating Beethoven in 1927 Vienna (Article)
Title: Imperialist Substitutions: Commemorating Beethoven in 1927 Vienna
Author: Annegret Fauser
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Vienna, Austria: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften

Diabetes, Race, and Amputations (Article)
Title: Diabetes, Race, and Amputations
Author: Richard M. Mizelle
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Lancet

Deamonte Driver and the Perils of Race and Health Care in the Affordable Care Act Era (Article)
Title: Deamonte Driver and the Perils of Race and Health Care in the Affordable Care Act Era
Author: Richard M. Mizelle
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Condition or Process?: Researching Race in Education

Hurricane Katrina, Diabetes, and the Meaning of Resiliency (Article)
Title: Hurricane Katrina, Diabetes, and the Meaning of Resiliency
Author: Richard M. Mizelle
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Isis

The Role of the Scribe: Genius and Guide (Article)
Title: The Role of the Scribe: Genius and Guide
Author: Martha Dana Rust
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Other
Periodical Title: The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Unscrolling the History of Mewar Kings (Article)
Title: Unscrolling the History of Mewar Kings
Author: Cynthia Talbot
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Other
Periodical Title: A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur
Publisher: Hirmer Publishers

Caught in a Conflict of Loyalties: Rathor Ramsingh’s Death, 1577 (Article)
Title: Caught in a Conflict of Loyalties: Rathor Ramsingh’s Death, 1577
Author: Cynthia Talbot
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Caught in a Conflict of Loyalties: Rathor Ramsingh’s Death, 1577 (Article)
Title: Caught in a Conflict of Loyalties: Rathor Ramsingh’s Death, 1577
Author: Cynthia Talbot
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Anger and Atonement in Mughal India: An Alternative Account of Akbar’s 1578 Hunt (Article)
Title: Anger and Atonement in Mughal India: An Alternative Account of Akbar’s 1578 Hunt
Author: Cynthia Talbot
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Primary URL: n/a
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Modern Asian Studies 55

A Subversive Bonanza: The Construction of the Panama Canal, the Biomedical and Life Sciences, and the Birth of Tropical Ecology (Book Section)
Title: A Subversive Bonanza: The Construction of the Panama Canal, the Biomedical and Life Sciences, and the Birth of Tropical Ecology
Author: Paul S. Sutter
Editor: Martin Meiske
Editor: Eike-Christian Heine
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://worldcat.org/title/1309056851
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Book Title: Beyond the Lab and the Field Infrastructures As Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century
ISBN: 9780822987789

Sensible Individuation (Article)
Title: Sensible Individuation
Author: Sethi, Umrao
Abstract: There is a straightforward view of perception that has not received adequate consideration because it requires us to rethink basic assumptions about the objects of perception. In this paper, I develop a novel account of these objects—the sensible qualities—which makes room for the straightforward view. I defend two primary claims. First, I argue that qualities like color and shape are “ontologically flexible” kinds. That is, their real definitions allow for both physical objects and mental entities to be colored or shaped. Second, a single instance of these qualities can be attributed to more than one entity. Just as we attribute the same instance of a material property to a statue and to the clay that constitutes it, single instances of sensible qualities should be attributed both to the physical objects perceived and to the perceptual states that have those instances as their objects.
Year: 2023
Secondary URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/phpr.12908
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (Book)
Title: Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
Title: Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
Author: Kelley, Blair L. M
Author: Kelley, Blair L. M
Abstract: There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic “white working class,” a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. Spanning two hundred years—from one of Kelley’s earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic—Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs white people didn’t want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights. As her narrative moves from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, Kelley treats Black workers not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered—to themselves, to their communities, and to a nation that denied that basic fact. Through affecting portraits of her great-grandfather, a sharecropper named Solicitor, and her grandmother, Brunell, who worked for more than a decade as a domestic maid, Kelley captures, in intimate detail, how generation after generation of labor was required to improve, and at
Abstract: There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic “white working class,” a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. Spanning two hundred years—from one of Kelley’s earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic—Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs white people didn’t want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights. As her narrative moves from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, Kelley treats Black workers not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered—to themselves, to their communities, and to a nation that denied that basic fact. Through affecting portraits of her great-grandfather, a sharecropper named Solicitor, and her grandmother, Brunell, who worked for more than a decade as a domestic maid, Kelley captures, in intimate detail, how generation after generation of labor was required to improve, and at
Year: 2023
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631496554
Primary URL: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631496554
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company
Type: Single author monograph
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-324-0955
ISBN: 978-1-324-0955

Prizes

Finalist for Book Prize in History
Date: 2/21/2024
Organization: Los Angeles Times