Five UT faculty members and three graduate students have been selected as the second class of resident fellows of the University of Tennessee Humanities Center.
Faculty fellows have a full year to focus on a project of their own choosing. Graduate students will use the year to work full time on finishing their dissertation.
The faculty fellows include:
- EJ Coffman, associate professor, associate department head, and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Philosophy. Coffman’s project is “Luck: Its Nature and Significance for Human Knowledge and Agency.”
- Amy Elias, professor in the Department of English. Elias’s project is “Only Connect: Dialogue and the Commons in the Post-1960s Arts.”
- Jacob Latham, assistant professor in the Department of History. Latham’s project is “The pompa circensis and the Urban Image of Rome: Processions, Topography, and Memory.”
- Christopher Magra, associate professor in the Department of History. Magra’s project is “Poseidon’s Curse: Capitalism and the Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution.”
- Robert Sklenar, associate professor in the Department of Classics. Sklenar’s project is “Oratio Corrupta and the Poetics of Senecan Tragedy.”
Graduate fellows include:
- Geoffrey Martin, fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of History. Martin’s dissertation is Mozarob Readers of the Bible, 9th–12th Centuries.
- Virginia Murphy, fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of English. Murphy’s dissertation is A Mirror Encleared: Changing the Reflection in Tudor Drama.
- Bradley Nichols, fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of History. Nichols’ dissertation is The Hunt for Lost Blood: Nazi Racial Selection and Re-Germanization Policy, 1939–1945.
In addition to this year’s resident fellows, the center also will host other UT faculty and graduate students who have won awards and fellowships this year:
- Thomas Burman, professor in the Department of History and recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.
- Mary Campbell, assistant professor in the School of Art and recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship.
- Shellen Wu, assistant professor in the Department of History and recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship.
- Leah Giamalva, fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of History and recipient of a Marco Haslam Dissertation fellowship.
- Katherine Hodges-Kluck, fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of History and recipient of a Marco Haslam Dissertation fellowship.
“Our aim is to deepen and broaden humanities research at UT,” said Thomas Heffernan, Kenneth Curry Professor in the Humanities and director of the center. “We do this by giving the fellows a year of leave to write their books or complete their dissertations without any competing demands on their time and attention.”
Heffernan said it’s not easy to obtain a fellowship, because scholars must demonstrate that they have prepared themselves and applied to many other national funding agencies. The applications are then vetted by a series of academic reviewers who are prominent in their fields. “You really have to have the goods to get here,” Heffernan said.
In the second year of the fellowship program, Heffernan said, both applications and awards have increased. Since 2004, according to Heffernan, UT is in the top ten in National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowships and first in the country for NEH summer stipends.
For more information, visit the University of Tennessee Humanities Center website.
—
CONTACT:
Charles Primm (865-974-5180, charles.primm@tennessee.edu)