Humanities Center Announces Fellowship Winners

The UT Humanities Center has announced its class of fellows for the 2015–16 academic year. The faculty and graduate student fellowship recipients will be afforded a full year in the Humanities Center to pursue their respective research projects.

“The humanities are crucial to our development as thoughtful citizens capable of thinking critically in an ever increasingly complex world,” said Thomas Heffernan, director of the Humanities Center. “Our knowledge of our historical traditions is an indispensable guide to an enlightened future.”

The faculty recipients of the Humanities Center awards are:

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  Stephen Collins-Elliot, assistant professor of in the Department of Classics. His project, The Table of the Transient World: Roman Imperialism and the Culture of Consumption, 600 BCE–100 CE, places food consumption and its material effects at the forefront of history in order to chart long-term social trends among the mass population.

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  Mary Dzon, associate professor of English. Her project, A Study of Mary’s Vitae within the Devotional and Scholastic Culture of the Later Middle Ages, shows how an encyclopedic mentality prompted the reconstruction of the life of Mary in the high Middle Ages.

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  Kristina Gehrman, assistant professor of philosophy. Her project, Ethics by Nature: Aristotelian Ethics for Modern Times, is an attempt to make a case in favor of an Aristotelian, human-nature-based approach to ethics.

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  Anne-Hèlène Miller, assistant professor of French and Francophone studies. Her project, The Literary Status of French and Cultural Boundaries in the Fourteenth Century, considers the tensions generated by the literary status of French serving as a primary vernacular transnational literary language in Europe.

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  Tore Olsson, assistant professor of history. His project, Remaking the Rural World: The American South and Mexico during the Twentieth Century, bridges the fields of twentieth century US and Latin American history.

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  Jay Rubenstein, Alvin and Sally Beaman Professor of History. His project, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: Crusade, Prophecy and the Twelfth Century Discovery of the West, represents the culmination of fifteen years of research devoted to the First Crusade and its impact on European culture in the twelfth century and beyond.

The graduate student fellows are:

• Robert Glaze, a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of History. His work is titled The Army of Tennessee in War and Memory, 1861–1930.

• Andrew Lallier, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of English. His project is titled Sketches, Impressions and Romances: Literature as Experiment in the Nineteenth Century.

• Joshua Sander, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of History. His work is titled The Greater Germanic Reich: Nazification and the Creation of a New Dutch Identity in the Occupied Netherlands.

• John Stromski, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of English. His project is titled Breaking the Supply Chains: Ethics and Economics in Northern Literature, 1840–1900.

Heffernan said the Humanities Center received more applications this year than in previous years.

“We recognize the talent among the humanities faculty and doctoral student population from the quality of the applications received, which made the selection difficult,” he said.

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CONTACT:

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)