Postdoctoral Fellowships

FAIN: RA-50008-03

Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, VA 23187-8781)
Ronald Hoffman (Project Director: September 2002 to January 2010)

One twelve-month fellowship for each of three years.

The Institute seeks to renew, through the Endowment's Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions, funds for two-year postdoctoral fellowships for the 2004-2007 grant period. The proposal requests support for three fellows who will conduct research in areas of early American studies with the goal of preparing manuscripts for book publication. They will be NEH fellows in successive twelve-month terms in 2005, 2006, and 2007. The Institute's fifty-nine-year-old fellowship program has a well-deserved reputation for quality and productivity and is held in high regard by the historical profession. As a dedicated research center and a publisher of important work about the early American period, the Institute provides an ideal setting for scholars working on their first book-length publications.

Associated Products

A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (Book)
Title: A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania
Author: Patrick M. Erben
Abstract: Drawing on German and English archival sources, the author examines iconic translations that engendered community in colonial Pennsylvania, including William Penn's translingual promotional literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius's multilingual poetics, Ephrata's "angelic" singing and transcendent calligraphy, the Moravians' polyglot mission, and the common language of suffering for peace among Quakers, Pietists, and Mennonites. Erben presents a counternarrative to monolingualism and Enlightenment empiricism in eighteenth-century America.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/harmony-of-the-spirits-translation-and-the-language-of-community-in-early-pennsylvania/oclc/756594337&referer=brief_resultshttp://
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780807835579

Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous Slaves & Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Book)
Title: Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous Slaves & Atlantic Slaveries in New France
Author: Brett Rushforth
Abstract: Based on thousands of French and Algonquian-language manuscripts archived in Canada, France, the United States and the Caribbean, Bonds of Alliance bridges the divide between continental and Atlantic approaches to early American history. By discovering unexpected connections between distant peoples and places, Rushforth sheds new light on a wide range of subjects, including intercultural diplomacy, colonial law, gender and sexuality, and the history of race.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/bonds-of-alliance-indigenous-and-atlantic-slaveries-in-new-france/oclc/756594341&referer=brief_resultshttp://
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/11704.html
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's webpage
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780807835586
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

2013 Merle Curti Award
Date: 4/1/2013
Organization: Organization of American Historians
Abstract: Awarded for the best book published in American social history

2013 FEEGI Biennial Book Prize
Date: 1/1/2013
Organization: Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction
Abstract: Awarded to the best book published in English. The best book prize recognizes works published in a two-year period.

Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Book)
Title: Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America
Author: Wendy Bellion
Abstract: Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship. (from Publisher's website)
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/citizen-spectator-art-illusion-and-visual-perception-in-early-national-america/oclc/640132952&referer=brief_resultshttp://
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-7455.html
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: North Carolina University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8078-338
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

The Charles C. Eldridge Prize
Date: 4/1/2014
Organization: Smithsonian Art Museum
Abstract: Awarded to a recent book-length publication that provides new insight into works of art, the artists who made them, or aspects of history and theory that enrich our understanding of America's artistic heritage.

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Book)
Title: The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution
Author: Robert G. Parkinson
Abstract: When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like “domestic insurrectionists” and “merciless savages,” the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic. In a fresh reading of the founding moment, Parkinson demonstrates the dual projection of the “common cause.” Patriots through both an ideological appeal to popular rights and a wartime movement against a host of British-recruited slaves and Indians forged a racialized, exclusionary model of American citizenship.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/13607.html
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4696-266
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

AEJMC History Division Award
Date: 8/9/2017
Organization: Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
Abstract: Awarded annually for " the Best Journalism and Mass Communication History Book."

James A. Rawley Prize
Date: 4/8/2017
Organization: Organization of American Historians

Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence? (Article)
Title: Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence?
Author: Robert G. Parkinson
Abstract: This op-ed piece appeared in the July 4, 2016 edition of the New York Times and was written by The Common Cause author and OI-NEH Fellow Robert Parkinson.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/opinion/did-a-fear-of-slave-revolts-drive-american-independence.html?_r=0
Primary URL Description: Link to July 4, 2016 op-ed piece in NY Times by Robert Parkinson
Format: Newspaper
Periodical Title: The New York Times
Publisher: The New York Times

For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (Book)
Title: For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia
Author: Alexander B. Haskell
Abstract: By recovering a largely forgotten English Renaissance mindset that regarded sovereignty and Providence as being fundamentally entwined, Alexander Haskell reconnects concepts historians had before treated as separate categories and argues that the first English planters in Virginia operated within a deeply providential age rather than an era of early modern entrepreneurialism. These men did not merely settle Virginia; they and their London-based sponsors saw this first successful English venture in America as an exercise in divinely inspired and approved commonwealth creation. When the realities of Virginia complicated this humanist ideal, growing disillusionment and contention marked debates over the colony. Rather than just "selling" colonization to the realm, proponents instead needed to overcome profound and recurring doubts about whether God wanted English rule to cross the Atlantic and the process by which it was to happen. By contextualizing these debates within a late Renaissance phase in England, Haskell links increasing religious skepticism to the rise of decidedly secular conceptions of state power. Haskell offers a radical revision of accepted narratives of early modern state formation, locating it as an outcome, rather than as an antecedent, of colonial endeavor.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/for-god-king-and-people-forging-commonwealth-bonds-in-renaissance-virginia/oclc/1032364556/editions?editionsView=true&referer=br
Secondary URL: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469618029/for-god-king-and-people/
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1469618029
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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