NEH Research Fellowship Program

FAIN: RA-50031-05

Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (San Marino, CA 91108-1299)
Robert C. Ritchie (Project Director: September 2004 to September 2010)

Three humanities fellowships per year for three years.

The Huntington requests renewal of the Endowment’s support for its NEH Fellowship Program. Such support will enable scholars to conduct research utilizing the extensive collections in the Library and Art Collections or write while surrounded by the Huntington's resources. Selected by an independent peer review panel from a national application process, the NEH Fellows will be compensated with a stipend facilitating their residence for up to one year. They will also enjoy the support of Huntington staff, opportunities for dialog with other fellows, and the full schedule of conferences, lectures, and seminars.

Associated Products

Death by Effigy: A Case From the Mexican Inquisition (Book)
Title: Death by Effigy: A Case From the Mexican Inquisition
Author: Luis Corteguera
Abstract: On July 21, 1578, the Mexican town of Tecamachalco awoke to news of a scandal. A doll-like effigy hung from the door of the town's church. Its two-faced head had black chicken feathers instead of hair. Each mouth had a tongue sewn onto it, one with a forked end, the other with a gag tied around it. Signs and symbols adorned the effigy, including a sambenito, the garment that the Inquisition imposed on heretics. Below the effigy lay a pile of firewood. Taken together, the effigy, signs, and symbols conveyed a deadly message: the victim of the scandal was a Jew who should burn at the stake. Over the course of four years, inquisitors conducted nine trials and interrogated dozens of witnesses, whose testimonials revealed a vivid portrait of friendship, love, hatred, and the power of rumor in a Mexican colonial town. A story of dishonor and revenge, Death by Effigy also reveals the power of the Inquisition's symbols, their susceptibility to theft and misuse, and the terrible consequences of doing so in the New World. Recently established and anxious to assert its authority, the Mexican Inquisition relentlessly pursued the perpetrators. Lying, forgery, defamation, rape, theft, and physical aggression did not concern the Inquisition as much as the misuse of the Holy Office's name, whose political mission required defending its symbols. Drawing on inquisitorial papers from the Mexican Inquisition's archive, Luis R. Corteguera weaves a rich narrative that leads readers into a world vastly different from our own, one in which symbols were as powerful as the sword.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/death-by-effigy-a-case-from-the-mexican-inquisition/oclc/777386237&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: Death by effigy : a case from the Mexican Inquisition Author: Luis R Corteguera Publisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, ©2012. Series: Early modern Americas. Edition/Format: Book : English : 1st ed Rating: (not yet rated) 0 with reviews - Be the first.
Secondary URL: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15029.html
Secondary URL Description: Death by Effigy A Case from the Mexican Inquisition University of Pennsylvania Press Luis R. Corteguera 240 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. Cloth Sep 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4439-7 | $39.95s | £26.00 | Add to cart A volume in the Early Modern Americas series View table of contents and excerpt
Publisher: University of Pennsyvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8122-443
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic (Book)
Title: The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic
Author: Tony C. Brown
Abstract: Tony C. Brown examines "the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothing" in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considers--including the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoe--turn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage. In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in one's ability to understand the human's relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidence--what Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological security--traces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the human's place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to "exotic" examples from the New World--such as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practice--making them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-primitive-the-aesthetic-and-the-savage
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Secondary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/primitive-the-aesthetic-and-the-savage-an-enlightenment-problematic/oclc/788275035&referer=brief_results
Secondary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780816675623
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America (Book)
Title: The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America
Author: Joshua Piker
Abstract: Who was Acorn Whistler, and why did he have to die? A deeply researched analysis of a bloody eighteenth-century conflict and its tangled aftermath, The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler unearths competing accounts of the events surrounding the death of this Creek Indian. Told from the perspectives of a colonial governor, a Creek Nation military leader, local Native Americans, and British colonists, each story speaks to issues that transcend the condemned man’s fate: the collision of European and Native American cultures, the struggle of Indians to preserve traditional ways of life, and tensions within the British Empire as the American Revolution approached. At the hand of his own nephew, Acorn Whistler was executed in the summer of 1752 for the crime of murdering five Cherokee men. War had just broken out between the Creeks and the Cherokees to the north. To the east, colonists in South Carolina and Georgia watched the growing conflict with alarm, while British imperial officials kept an eye on both the Indians’ war and the volatile politics of the colonists themselves. They all interpreted the single calamitous event of Acorn Whistler’s death through their own uncertainty about the future. Joshua Piker uses their diverging accounts to uncover the larger truth of an early America rife with violence and insecurity but also transformative possibility.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/four-deaths-of-acorn-whistler-telling-stories-in-colonial-america/oclc/812067632&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674046863
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674046863
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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