Fellowships Overview
Announcing the recipients of the 2022 OI-NEH ARP postdoctoral fellowship program
With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities American Rescue Plan Humanities Grantmaking program, and in response to the deepening crisis in humanities employment for early career scholars exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Omohundro Institute has awarded postdoctoral fellowships for 2-, 3-, or 4-month terms, based on recipient need, to the following scholars. To be eligible for the fellowship, the applicants had to be employed as contingent faculty or in non-academic positions at the time of application. Recipients receive $5,000 per month of research stipend.
“The National Endowment for the Humanities is grateful to the Omohundro Institute for its work in administering American Rescue Plan funding to assist humanities scholars affected by the pandemic,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “These grant awards will provide much-needed support to junior scholars, allowing them to conduct important research on American history and culture, build and sustain careers in the humanities, and pave the way for new scholarship and discovery.”
The fellowship program grew out of conversations with the OI community, including current and former Council members and fellows, as well as many others across the early American field. These discussions confirmed that long-term shifts in the profession and job market—shifts sharply exacerbated by the pandemic—mean that junior scholars require greater flexibility in fellowship terms and that the need for research support is particularly acute among contingently-employed scholars and those working beyond the academy.
As part of the fellowship program, the OI will offer an extended set of workshops for OI-NEH ARP fellows in summer 2022 that will include guidance and support toward publication, in traditional academic as well as public-facing venues. Following the model of the popular OI Coffeehouse tables, the OI also will offer regular online writing-focused workshops. Fellows may take advantage of these offerings as they choose.
Recipients include:
Zachary Bennett (3-month fellowship)—currently a visiting assistant professor at Norwich University—for work on Contested Currents: Rivers and the Remaking of Early America.
Emily Casey (3-month fellowship)—independent scholar—for work on Hydrographic Vision: Representing the Sea in British America, 1750-1800.
Lila O’Leary Chambers (3-month fellowship)—currently a research fellow with the AHRC-funded Legacies of the British Slave Trade at University College London—for work on Liquid Capital: Alcohol and the Rise of the British Atlantic Slaving Complex, 1603-1736.
Kelly Chaves (2-month fellowship)—currently Director of Fine Arts Program at Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics—for work on Paumpágussit’s People: Defining and Defending the Ocean in Ninnimissinuok and Wabanaki Country, 1550-175.
Caitlin Hopkins (2-month fellowship)—independent scholar—for work on “‘Can Work at the Goldsmith’s Business’: Enslaved Artisans and the Problem of the Workshop.”
Sheri Huerta (3-month fellowship)—currently an adjunct professor at George Mason University—for work on Virginia’s 1806 Removal Act and Its Effects.
E. Bennett Jones (4-month fellowship)—currently the Chabraja CCHS Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern University—for work on “The Indians Say”: Settler Colonialism and the Scientific Study of Animals in America, 1722 to 1846.
Marsely Kehoe (2-month fellowship)—currently the Assistant Director of Hope College’s Office of Sponsored Research and Programs—for work on Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602-1795 with research partner Carrie Anderson (Middlebury College).
Suzanne Litrel (2-month fellowship)—currently a history education consultant—for work on Negotiating Dutch Brazil: Portuguese Atlantic Resistance and Renewal, 1580-1654.
Deirdre Lyons (3-month fellowship)—currently a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Social Sciences Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Program and the College at the University of Chicago—for work on Slavery, Emancipation, and Family Politics in the Nineteenth-Century French Antilles.
Jay Miller (3-month fellowship)—currently an American Council of Learned Societies Carl and Betty Pforzheimer Fellow in English and American Literature at the ACLS—for work on Quaker Jeremiad.
J.E. Morgan (4-month fellowship)—currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Florida’s Department of History—for work on American Concubines: Gender, Race, Law, and Power.
John Morton (3-month fellowship)—currently a visiting assistant professor at Boston College—for Making Nations: The Northeastern Borderlands in an Age of Revolution.
Jesús Ruiz (3-month fellowship)—currently a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University—for The Black Royalists: Haiti and A Politics of Freedom in the Atlantic World.
Franklin Sammons (3-month fellowship)—currently a visiting assistant professor at Washington & Lee University—for Yazoo’s Settlement: Capitalizing on Dispossession in Early America.
Noel Smyth (3-month fellowship)—currently a lecturer at University of California Santa Cruz—for The Natchez Diaspora: A History of Indigenous Displacement and Survival, 1731-1761.
Arianne Urus (4-month fellowship)—currently a lecturer at Harvard University—for Properties of Empire: Environment and Law in the Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland Cod Fisheries.
Nathaniel Windon (3-month fellowship)—currently a lecturer at Loyola University Maryland—for work on Superannuation: Race and the Making of Old Age in Nineteenth-Century America.