2025 Alumni College Fellows

Established in 2015, Alumni College Fellowships provide funding for individual scholarly projects. Each year, the Humanities Center selects up to twelve fellows, who receive funding and who present their work at our autumn Alumni College event.

Curtis Bauer (English)

Project: "Translating the book El lugar de las palabras…[The Place of Words] by the Colombian writer María Gómez Lara"

In this project I will translate El lugar de las palabras…[The Place of Words] by the Colombian writer María Gómez Lara. This book project is significant not only because it will be the first translation into English of this international award-winning Colombian poet but it also makes available a unique, multidisciplinary gaze into how art and literature can help us formulate responses to our traumas, which in Gómez Lara’s case is the linguistic and physical consequences of brain tumor treatment. This translation is under consideration to be published by World Poetry Editions.

Paul Bjerk (History)

Project: "Money as Discourse: A History of the Tanzanian Shilling"

Sweden led the Scandinavian donor effort to support Julius Nyerere’s socialist government from 1965-1985. Despite their support, as I argue in an archive-driven book chapter on the "Preliminary History of the Bank of Tanzania," the country faced bankruptcy by 1980. This is a complex story of the failure of an idealistic vision for modernizing a postcolonial economy in a broad-based manner. I seek to avoid simplistic ideological explanations and focus economics and finance as historical and culturally generated discourses.

Aaron Braver (English)

Project: "Language learning by osmosis: Click perception by monolingual English speakers in different cultural contexts"

Children seem to learn language by osmosis: a child in an English-speaking community will learn English. But what happens when a child is raised near, but not in, a language community?

This project investigates the role of nearby language communities in people’s perception of click sounds, such as those found in Bantu languages. I will compare two groups of monolingual English speakers—those raised near communities that speak a click language (in Makhanda, South Africa) and those not raised near such communities (in Lubbock). I expect that these groups will differ in their ability to distinguish among different click sounds.

Laura Calkins (History)

Project: "Public Health and Epidemiological Intelligence in Postwar Asia"

I am writing a book-length study of United Nations (UN) humanitarian aid to Asia in the decade following the Second World War. The project addresses a significant gap in the scholarly literature on the history of postwar Asia, which largely neglects the elaborate transnational relief initiatives of UN agencies. To supplement the extensive research already conducted at the UN Archives in New York and at other specialist collections in the US, I propose consulting unique, non-circulating original materials held by repositories in London which can illuminate public health programming, a key part of the UN’s humanitarian work in postwar Asia.

Linda Gosner (Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures)

Project: "Mining in Roman Iberia: Industry, Community, and Empire"

My book project is a social and economic history of the Roman mining industry in the Iberian Peninsula, a region that supplied metals used in coins and urban infrastructure across the Mediterranean. I explore the lived experiences of miners who labored in these important mines and the material networks that connected them to the wider Roman Empire.

Marta Kvande (English)

Project: "The Female American (1767): A Scholarly Edition"

As an essential step in the preparation of my new edition of The Female American (1767), I plan to travel to Yale’s Beinecke Library, the only library in the US to hold copies of all three editions of this rare and unusual novel. To edit the text responsibly and effectively, it is essential that I consult all three extant editions. The first edition (London, 1767) will serve as the copy-text, and studying the the 1800 and 1814 editions published in America will enable me not only to identify variants but also to study the American context of these later editions.

Richard Lutjens (History)

Project: "Ordinary Crime and the Persecution of Jewish Germans, 1933 - 1945"

In Nazi Germany, individuals with no discernible ideological attachment to Nazism were able to exploit the marginal position of Jews within society and commit "ordinary" crimes against Jews. Yet these individuals, while furthering the Nazi project of the persecution of Jews, simultaneously undermined state-approved National-Socialist antisemitic policy and were punished by the state because of this. My research will explore this paradox.

John William Nelson (History)

Project: "A Renegades’ History of the Revolutionary Frontier: Contesting Race and Nation in the Early American West"

This project examines the hardening divisions between Native peoples and settlers in the early United States. It does so by tracing the intertwined histories of some of the most prominent individuals who switched sides to ally with Native peoples during the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. The project reconstructs the lives of these so-called “renegades” from the mid-eighteenth century forward, as they continued to operate between cultures. The project seeks to understand the many motivations that led individuals to challenge the growing cultural schisms between Native and settler societies, even as racial divisions became more entrenched through policy and practice.

Anna Novotny (Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work)

Project: "Connecting Past and Present: The Old Canaan Bioarchaeology Project"

The Old Canaan Cemetery Bioarchaeology Project (OCBP) is a multidisciplinary endeavor to document the biological and cultural heritage of an African American Freedom Colony in east Texas. Due to Jim Crow-era violence, the descendant community lost access to their family cemetery for 80 years. With few headstones and no documents to indicate where their loved ones are buried, the cemetery association turned to archaeology to reconstruct their family history. Excavations in 2023 collected samples of human remains and documented material culture associated with each grave. Genetic genealogy will re-establish ancestral connections to bring a rural community together.

Abigail Swingen (History)

Project: "The Financial Revolution and the Politics of Moral Crisis in Early Modern Britain"

My book, The Financial Revolution and the Politics of Moral Crisis in Early Modern Britain, focuses on moments of political and cultural crisis from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s to explore why a Financial Revolution occurred in Britain and how people responded to it. The increased reliance on impersonal, state-supported instruments of public credit and debt, the growth of financial markets, as well as new and invasive forms of taxation, fundamentally altered British state and society.

Virginia Whealton (History)

Project: "Femininity, Domesticity, and Gentility: Mapping the Piano in Virginia, 1815-1860"

In the nineteenth-century, American women were told that skill on the piano was a pathway to virtue, femininity, and even marital bliss, but was the piano as intertwined with middle-class domesticity as cultural memory suggests? My research on Virginia shows that—except in large cities—it was not. I use comprehensive piano tax records from 1815, 1846, and 1860 to establish piano ownership throughout the state. Through digital mapping and storytelling of piano ownership in Virginia, my project reveals abiding regional differences in music and society. These differences reflect and anticipate divides that would ultimately fracture Virginia in 1861.

Allison Whitney (English)

Project: "From Expo 70 to the Future: IMAX in Japan"

My research is part of an ongoing project on the history of IMAX cinema in Asia. This research will contribute to a forthcoming book project, a special issue of a scholarly journal I am co-editing, and an application for a “Planning International Collaboration” grant under the NEH’s Collaborative Research program.