FOR RELEASE: April 15, 2015

CONTACT:
Susan Billmaier | Program Officer, Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship | (609) 452-7007 x310
Patrick Riccards | Director of Media Relations and Strategy| (703) 298-8283

Note: Prospective applicants should call 609-452-7007 x310 or email [email protected]

2015 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows Named

Foundation names 22 Fellows in its 34th year

PRINCETON, NJ – The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has awarded 22 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships for the 2015–2016 academic year.

The newly recognized Fellows are doctoral candidates writing dissertations on topics involving religious and ethical values. Each will receive a 12-month award of $25,000 to support the final year of dissertation work. The program is highly selective, with fewer than 5 percent of applicants from across the country awarded fellowships in 2015.

This year’s Newcombe Fellows represent 14 institutions from across the nation. Their fields of study include anthropology, art history, classics, comparative literature, English, Hebrew and Judaic studies, history, Middle Eastern and North African studies, Near Eastern studies, music, and religious studies.

Fellows are writing on such topics as the interconnected histories of poverty and slavery across the United States and the British Empire; cosmological understandings that created and sustained witch beliefs in early modern Navarra; the relationships between Chinese Christian ethical approaches and national discourses of moral crisis in contemporary China; and the problem of frozen embryos left over from in vitro fertilization and saved for future use. (See the full list of Fellows below.)

The Newcombe Fellowship is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. Funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the fellowship was created in 1981 and has supported just over 1,100 doctoral candidates, most of them now noted faculty at domestic and foreign institutions.

For more information on the Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, please visit http://woodrow.org/fellowships/newcombe/

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About the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
Founded in 1945, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (www.woodrow.org) identifies and develops the nation’s best minds to meet its most critical challenges. The Foundation supports its Fellows as the next generation of leaders shaping American society.

 

Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows, 2015

 Zaid Adhami • Religious Studies, Duke University
Certainty with Doubt? American Secularity and Muslim Discourses of “Belief”

Michael Amoruso • Religious Studies, University of Texas, Austin
Spiritual Transit: The Devotion to Souls, Religious Movement, and Syncretism in São Paulo, Brazil

Risa Cromer • Anthropology, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Saved: Science, Religion, and the Frozen Embryo Problem in the United States

Jibreel Delgado • School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona
Defining Values, Morals, Ethics and Law: Rival Modern Muslim Revivals and the Reorganization of Islamic Knowledge

Sean Dowdy • Anthropology, University of Chicago
Goroka: Cosmography and the Shared Account in Assam

Allison Edgren • History, University of Notre Dame
The Needy, the “Lazy,” and the “Lying”: Beggars and Begging in Late Medieval Germany

Emanuel Fiano • Religious Studies, Duke University
Three Powers in Heaven: The Trinitarian Controversies in Fourth-Century Syria and the Christian-Jewish Continuum

Christopher Florio • History, Princeton University, Princeton
The Poor Always with You: Poverty in an Age of Emancipation, 1833-1879

Kevin Ko • History, Yale University, New Haven
Modern Bodies, Modern Souls: Religion, Medicine, and the Public Imagination in Late Colonial Indonesia

Paul Love • Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan
Writing a Network, Constructing a Tradition: The Formation and Maintenance of Ibadi Muslim Intellectual Networks in Medieval North Africa

Derin McLeod • Classics, University of California, Berkeley
The Point of a Politeia: Changing Conceptions of Regimen and Regime from 500 to 350 BCE

Dasa Mortensen • History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Historical Amnesia in Shangri-la: The Contested Legacy of Tibetan Participation in the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Emily Ransom • English, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame
Redeeming Complaint in Tudor and Stuart Devotional Lyric

Justin Reynolds • History, Columbia University, New York
The Rise and Fall of the Ecumenical: International Protestantism between Secularization and Politics, 1914-1952

Rochelle Rojas • History, Duke University, Durham
Witch Crafting in Early Modern Navarra, 1525-1675

Joshua Schwartz • Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
The Most Whole Thing: A Phenomenology of the Broken Heart in Hasidism

August Sheehy • Department of Music, University of Chicago
Music Analysis as a Practice of the Self, from Weber to Schoenberg

Erica Sherman • Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University
Urban Agents: Confraternities, Devotion and the Formation of a New Urban State

Stuart Strange • Anthropology, University of Michigan
Spirit Possession, Knowledge, and the Ethics of Kinship in Multi-Ethnic Suriname

Elise Wang • Comparative Literature, Princeton University
The Ethics of Measurement in Fourteenth-century English Literature

Xiaobo Yuan • Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago;
Reform and Purification: the Politics and Practices of Ethical Cultivation in Chinese Christianities

Sarah Zaides • History, University of Washington
Tevye’s Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in the Shatterzones of Empires, 1882-1923

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