Four faculty members and one graduate student have won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Among this year's recipients are Professor of Modern Culture and Media Mary Doane, Associate Professor of Anthropology Matthew Gutmann, Professor of Religious Studies Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Associate Professor of History Robert Self and Daniel Schensul MA'04 GS, a doctoral candidate in sociology.
The ACLS is a nonprofit organization that encourages advancement in the humanities and social sciences and supports institutions dedicated to those subjects. This support is given primarily through its many fellowship programs.
Self was one of 11 scholars awarded the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars for his project "The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in the United States from Watts to Reagan." His studies will investigate questions of manhood and masculinity, second wave feminism, the politics of public and private and other issues of gender and sexuality from the past few decades and their effect on politics, Self told The Herald.
To supplement Self's nationwide archival research, the fellowship grants him access to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University to research and write his book on the subject. This will be Self's second book - his first, "American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland," published in 2005, is a case study of urban politics in Oakland, Calif.
Schensul was awarded the Early Career Fellowship Program Dissertation Completion Fellowship, to be funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for his project "Remaking an Apartheid City: State-Led Spatial Transformation in Durban, South Africa." Schensul used spatial analysis, Geographical Information Systems and qualitative fieldwork to map cities' social and geographical data and investigate the effects of infrastructure expansion on economic and racial inequalities in South Africa.
Awarded to 65 scholars out of a total of 1,144 applicants, this fellowship sponsors doctoral candidates' research expenses for one year under the agreement that the recipients will receive no further funding afterward. This gives the candidates a "hard deadline" to finish their dissertations promptly, said Schensul, who is now in the process of writing his dissertation and applying for jobs.
Doane, Gutmann and Harvey are three of 65 applicants out of a total of 1,016 to win the ACLS Fellowship. Doane's project, " 'Bigger Than Life': The Close-up and Scale in the Cinema," investigates how these techniques affect the relationship between the human body and space in modern cinema. Funding from the fellowship and Brown is allowing Doane to take leave this semester to research and work on her project, which will culminate in a book on the subject.
In his project, "Iraq Veterans in Dissent, Masculine Loyalties in Contention: Epiphanies among the Troops," Gutmann investigates how the Iraq war affects troops stationed there. Gutmann's project focuses on oral histories from those who joined the army voluntarily, later becoming dissenters of the Iraq war.
Harvey's project, "Teaching Women: Biblical Women and Women's Choirs in Syriac Tradition," examines the place and significance of women's voice in Syriac Christianity through Christian teachings, rituals and biblical representation.
Doane, Gutmann and Harvey were not available for comment.
