The UT Humanities Center has announced its third class of fellows for fall 2014. 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. Our knowledge of our historical traditions is an indispensable guide to an enlightened future,” said Thomas Heffernan, director of the Humanities Center. The faculty recipients of the Humanities Center awards are:
- Misty Anderson, English professor. Her project, God on Stage: Performing Belief in the Long Eighteenth Century, looks at the ritual and religious concerns of theater from 1660-1800.
- Gregory Kaplan, Lindsay Young Professor of Spanish, in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures. His project—A Call for a Converso Return to the Hebrew Republic by Saul Levi Morteira, Spinoza’s Rabbi—is the first comprehensive study of an unedited work composed in Spanish around 1620 by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira.
- Avigail Sachs, assistant professor of architecture. Sachs’s work, Environmental Design: Architecture, Housing and Scientific Research in Postwar USA, examines environmental design after World War II.
- Charles Sanft, assistant professor of history. His project draws upon ancient archaeologically recovered letters to study common soldiers’ lives, work, and communication in early China Men of Letters: Writing at the Boundary of Person and Bureaucracy.
- Robert Stillman, professor of English. His work is A Rage for Order: The Literary Language of Economy in Early Modern England from Sidney to Shakespeare.
- Anthony Welch, associate professor of English. In his study, From Troy to Tenochtitlan: Colonial Epic and World History, Welch will trace the impact of Europe’s colonial period upon its epic literature, focusing chiefly on the Atlantic seafaring nations of England, Spain, and Portugal from 1570 to 1740.
The graduate student fellows are:
- Emily Cope, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of English. The title of her project is Enacted Rhetorical Theories in the Academic Writing of Evangelical Undergraduates at Public Universities.
- Katherine Hodges-Kluck, a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of History. Her work is titled The Matter of Jerusalem: The Holy Land in Angevin Court Culture and Identity, c. 1154–1216.
- Lauren McMillan, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology. Her dissertation title is Politics, Conflict, Exchange, and the Rise of a Capitalistic Culture in the Potomac Valley: The Tobacco Pipe Trade in the Chesapeake ca. 1630–1730.
- Victoria Swanson, a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of English. Her project is entitled Samuel Beckett: Age, Impairment, and the Drama of Confinement.
Faculty who have received prestigious national fellowships also will be in residence in the Humanities Center for the 2014–15 academic year. They include English Professor Nancy Henry, who has been awarded a National Endowment for Humanities Research Fellowship to complete her book, Women and the Nineteenth-Century Cultures of Investment. Also in residence is Thomas Lecaque, a fourth-year doctoral candidate, who is this year’s winner of the Jimmy and Dee Haslam Dissertation Prize, a fellowship that will support dissertation research and writing time for next year. His dissertation is entitled, The Count of Saint Gilles and the Saints of the Apocalypse: Occitanian Culture and Piety in the Time of the First Crusade.
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C O N T A C T :
Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)