printable versionHumanities Center selects 26 fellows from pool of nearly 350 applicants
The Stanford Humanities Center has selected 26 fellows for the 2005-06 academic year from a pool of nearly 350 applicants. The center supports interdisciplinary research in the humanities by bringing a diverse group of scholars to campus each year to write, conduct research and give presentations and lectures to the Stanford community.
Two scholars—Marines Fornerino from the Political Science Department at the Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela, and Alla Kassianova from the International Relations Department at Tomsk State University, Russia—were named Humanities and International Studies Fellows, as part of a new fellowship program. A joint effort of the Humanities Center and the Stanford Institute for International Studies, the fellowships are open to non-U.S. nationals whose work focuses on themes of international studies compatible with one of the five major research centers at SIIS.
"We are especially pleased to have this opportunity to collaborate with the Stanford Institute for International Studies to bring scholars from overseas and give them the time and space to write, to meet with Stanford faculty and students and to bring back these experiences to their home institutions," said Elizabeth Wahl, associate director of the Stanford Humanities Center (SHC). "Given Stanford's growing emphasis on international studies, it is also a timely fellowship that will benefit not only SHC and SIIS but the Stanford community as a whole."
Other fellows chosen from outside Stanford include Johannes Fabian, an anthropologist from the University of Amsterdam, whose 1991 book Power and Performance won the Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association; medievalist Steven Justice, an associate professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley, whose book Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 was awarded the Modern Language Association's 1995 award for best first book; and former Fulbright fellow Wendy Larson, a professor of East Asian languages and literatures at the University of Oregon. Larson's forthcoming book focuses on sexuality and revolutionary identity in Chinese fiction and film from the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Stanford faculty who will be 2005-06 fellows include David Holloway, the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and a senior fellow at SIIS, who is writing a biography of the physicist Yulii Khariton, the scientific director of the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos and counterpart to Robert Oppenheimer. Khariton's role in the Soviet nuclear program was kept secret until the 1980s. Other Stanford fellows include Yoshiko Matsumoto, associate professor of Asian languages, whose current research focuses on the ways in which age, gender and individual personae are reflected and performed in the verbal interactions of elderly Japanese women, and Rob Polhemus, the Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities and author of the recently published Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption and Women's Quest for Authority. Polhemus is at work on an interdisciplinary book project on the life and work of Woody Allen.
The center chooses scholars from all stages of their careers, from students to tenured faculty. (Undergraduate fellows for 2005-06 will be chosen during Autumn Quarter.) Having diversity as a core goal means that the evaluation process counts on the help of specialists across a wide range of disciplines, notes fellowship administrator Chi Elliott. "Selecting the cohort is a team effort. We had 198 scholars review files for us this year—82 of those readers are Stanford faculty members."
The center's fellowships are made possible by gifts and grants from the Esther Hayfer Bloom Estate, Theodore H. and Frances K. Geballe, Mimi and Peter Haas, Marta Sutton Weeks, the Mericos Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Following is a list of Humanities Center Fellows for 2005-06, their affiliations and research projects:
External Fellows