Prestigious as it was, news in December that the University of Illinois had received five National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships wasn’t even the full story. Two recent graduates from the College of LAS were also named recipients of the fellowships.
Additionally, three other alumni have been awarded Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Humberto Garcia (MA ’02, PhD ’07, English) and Melissa Girard (MA ’02, PhD ’09, English) also received NEH Fellowships for their work at Vanderbilt University and Loyola University Maryland, respectively. The fellowships are among the most highly competitive humanities grants in the nation.
Garcia, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, will be working on a project entitled "Romanticism Re-Oriented: Indian Authors and English Literary Culture, 1770-1830.” Girard, a professor of English at Loyola University Maryland, will be working on a project entitled "Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Problem of Sentimentality.”
Marky Neely (BA ’93, English), Sara Gelston (MFA ’12, creative writing), and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (MFA ’09, creative writing) were named recipients of the NEA poetry fellowships in December 2014. The NEA grants are for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement; 36 total were awarded last year.
“I cannot tell you how proud we are of our colleagues and former students,” says Michael Rothberg, professor and head of the Department of English. “For our faculty and recent alumni to receive seven NEH Fellowships in one year is a tremendous honor; for our alumni to win three NEA Fellowships at the same time is equally incredible. Taken together, these accomplishments say volumes about the excellent quality of humanities programs at Illinois.”
In December, Illinois announced that five professors in the College of LAS had received NEH Fellowships, which made the U of I the only institution to receive more than three for 2015. The grant faculty recipients include Antoinette Burton, professor of history, Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, professor of women’s studies, and interim head of the Department of Sociology; Robert Morrissey, professor of history; Timothy Pauketat, professor of anthropology and medieval studies; François Proulx, professor of French; and Valeria Sobol, professor of Slavic languages and literatures.
