Five professors in the College of LAS have received National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships, a prestigious award given to faculty and scholars for advanced research. The U of I is the only institution to be awarded more than three of the fellowships for 2015.
The grant recipients include Antoinette Burton, professor of history, Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, professor of gender and women’s studies, and interim head of the Department of Sociology; Robert Morrissey, a professor of history; Timothy Pauketat, professor of anthropology and of medieval studies; François Proulx, professor of French; and Valeria Sobol, professor of Slavic languages and literatures.
The fellowships are among the most highly sought in the nation. According to NEH, the fellowships program has received an average of 1,252 applications per year, and it has made an average of 88 awards. The agency issued 233 grants this year, totaling $17.9 million.
“These grants are among the most prestigious and competitive scholarly funding opportunities in the nation—in any discipline or field,” says Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise. “These scholars stand out both on our campus and across the country for their academic achievements, and it is gratifying to see them recognized for their excellence.”
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Ilesanmi Adesida says that the awards convey the broad excellence of the U of I.
“To be home to five such outstanding scholars in a single year is a mark of the highest distinction and a clear message that Illinois truly is a comprehensive public research university,” he says.
The faculty members and their projects include:
Burton: “Wars Against Nature? Environmental Fictions of the First Anglo-Afghan Wars.” Burton’s history is the first to argue that representations of Afghanistan’s difficult terrain served as a strategic fiction that allowed the British to blame their limited success in subduing the region in the 19th century on its hostile environment rather than on Afghan fighters—making it “the graveyard of empires” in the Victorian imagination.
Morrissey: “The Illinois and the Edge Effect: Bison Algonquians in the Colonial Mississippi Valley.” Morrissey’s project is the first ethnohistory and environmental history of the Illinois Indians and their neighbors from 1200 to 1850. He tells the story of the rise and decline of the Illinois as “bison Algonquians” who mastered this important and contested region at the center of the continent.
Pauketat: “Spirits, Birds, and Luminous Beings: Reconceptualizing Ancient Urbanism.” Pauketat reimagines the future of urbanism by looking back at some of the world’s most ancient cities, using new theories and even newer archaeological evidence from the ruins of cities and city-like places in Neolithic China, Africa, and the Americas before 1492.
Proulx: “Reading and French Masculinity at the Fin de Siècle.” Proulx investigates young men’s reading habits as a subject of grave social concern in fin-de-siècle (end of the century) France. He considers how excessive reading was blamed for the declining virility of French youth in the late 19th century, and details what was at stake in representations of the young male reader by novelists of the era from Jules Vallès to Marcel Proust.
Sobol: “Visions of Empire in Russian Gothic Literature, 1790-1850.” Sobol investigates the connection between the Gothic elements of many Russian literary works and their imperial context. She argues that the persistent presence of Gothic tropes is not just a tribute to a fashionable Western literary trend, but exposes the Russian empire’s anxieties about its borders, identity, and colonial power.
The NEH is an independent federal agency, and one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States.
“Whether through preserving important cultural artifacts or supporting new discoveries about our common past, NEH grants play a critical role in making the insights afforded by the humanities available to all to help us better understand ourselves, our culture, our society,” says NEH Chairman William Adams. “The remarkable scope of projects represented here speaks powerfully to the depth and excellence of humanities work that is going on across the country.”
