FOR RELEASE: May 17, 2018
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]

Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships Awarded

Foundation Names 21 PH.D. Candidates As Fellows in 2018

PRINCETON, NJ (May 17, 2018)– The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has awarded 21 promising scholars Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships.

This year’s Newcombe Fellows represent 15 institutions from across the nation. Their fields of study include anthropology, English, ethnomusicology, geography, health policy and management, history, philosophy, political science, religious studies, and sociology.

The Newcombe Fellowship fosters the original and significant study of ethical or religious values in all fields of the humanities and social sciences. Each 2018 Fellow will receive a 12-month award of $25,000 to support the final year of dissertation work.

Fellows are writing on such topics as the Ferguson Commission and the future of St. Louis; baroque and enlightenment Catholicism in 18th-century Spain; social welfare in South Africa; grassroots abortion funds; and the role of opacity in contemporary African American literature. (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 1,200 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, 2018

Joseph Bartzel ● Indiana University Bloomington, religious studies
From Riot to Reconciliation: The Ferguson Commission and the Future of St. Louis

Brian Bond ● The Graduate Center, City University of New York, etnomusicology
A Heavy Rain Has Fallen Upon My People: Sindhi Sufi Poetry Performance, Ethics, and Islamic Reform in Kachchh, Gujarat

Fernanda Bretones Lane ● Vanderbilt University, history
Spain, the Caribbean, and the Making of Religious Sanctuary

Onder Celik ● Johns Hopkins University, anthropology
Subterranean Dreams: Hunting for Armenian Treasures in the Post-Genocide Landscape

Reyhan Durmaz ● Brown University, religious studies    
Stories, Saints, and Sanctity between Christianity and Islam

Alexander Englert ● Johns Hopkins University, philosophy
Evolving the Highest Good: A Study of a Kantian Idea

Rachael Givens Johnson ● University of Virginia, history
Taught by Senses or Conquered by Words: Baroque and Enlightenment Catholicism in the Spanish Eighteenth Century

Amy Hanes ● Brandeis University, anthropology
Caring for Their Sake: Interspecies Care, Race, and Conservation in Cameroon’s Chimpanzee Sanctuaries 

Amy Kennemore ● University of California, San Diego, anthropology
Searching for Indigenous Justice: Navigating the Value of Legal Pluralism in the Uncertain Terrain of the Bolivian Andes  

Teresita Lozano ● University of Colorado, Boulder, ethnomusicology
Songs for the Ghosts, Saints for the Undocumented: Mexican Cristero Corridos and Transborder Immigration Discourse

Ariella Messing ● Johns Hopkins University, health policy and management
Hyde and Go Seek Funding: Grassroots Abortion Funds in the United States

Jeffrey Nicolaisen ● Duke University, religion
Equality of Life: Thinking with Multi-Species Relationships in Taiwan

Nasrin Olla ● Cornell University, English
Clamoring for Opacity: Contemporary African American Literature

Heath Pearson ● Princeton University, cultural anthropology
The Carceral Outside: Land Loss & Governance in an American Prison Town

Alix Riviere ● Tulane University, history
Bittersweet Childhoods: Enslaved Youth in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana and Martinique

Douaa Sheet ● The Graduate Center, CUNY, anthropology
The Influence of Differential Conceptions of “Dignity” on Transitional Justice Efforts in Post-uprising Tunisia

Larisa Svirsky ● University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, philosophy
Responsibility and Relationship

Erin Torkelson ● University of California, Berkeley, geography
Taken for Granted: Geographies of Social Welfare in South Africa

Isak Tranvik ● Duke University, political science
Existential Revolution: Democracy, Citizenship, and the Source of Popular Politics

Smriti Upadhyay ● Johns Hopkins University, sociology
Sacrifice, Selflessness, and Struggle: Religious Mobilization and the contemporary Indian Labor Movement

Emily Wright ● Tulane University, history
The Female Apostles of the South: Protestant Women’s Religious Activism in the Antebellum Gulf South

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