NEWS RELEASE
FOR RELEASE: May 23, 2019
CONTACT: Frances Hannan | 609.945.7886 |[email protected]
Note: Prospective applicants should call 609.452.7007 x310 or email [email protected]

2019 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows Named

Support for Promising Scholars Completing Dissertations Exploring Ethics and Religion

 

PRINCETON, NJ (May 23, 2019)—The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has named 23 outstanding Ph.D. candidates as 2019 Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellows. 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.

Each 2019 Fellow will receive a 12-month award of $25,000 to support the final year of dissertation writing. The award is open to doctoral candidates in any humanities or social sciences discipline to help encourage interesting, original, and significant study of ethical and religious values. Fellows are conducting research in a range of fields at some of the nation’s top institutions.

This year’s Fellows are completing dissertations on topics such as the feminist value of reproductive freedom, diverse experiences and understandings of pregnancy, and political disagreement over abortion; 19th-century emigration aid companies that subsidized westward expansion; Aristotle’s account of self-love and its role in motivating us towards our good; the ethical dilemmas and political-economic entanglements of gang violence in Central America; and the moral foundations and ethical stakes of autonomous artificial intelligence, in particular automated vehicle applications. (See the full list of Fellows, institutions, and dissertation titles below.)

Funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Fellowship was created in 1981 and has supported nearly 1,300 doctoral candidates, most of them now noted faculty at domestic and foreign institutions.

For more information on the Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, visit 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, 2019

Justine Bakker • Rice University, religion
“The Vibrations Are Different Here”: Parahuman Stories in Black Religion

Nimrod Ben Zeev • University of Pennsylvania, history
Foundations of Inequality: Construction, Political Economy, and the Senses in Palestine/Israel, 1918-1993

Courtney Buchkoski • University of Oklahoma, history
Evangelizing Settler Colonialism: Emigration Aid and the American West, 1820-1880

Sarah Buchmeier • University of Illinois at Chicago, English
Quarrels without God: Nineteenth-Century American Literature in the Age of Secularism

Luciana Chamorro Elizondo • Columbia University, anthropology
“Love is stronger than hate”: populist authoritarianism in post-revolutionary Nicaragua

Lucas de Lima • University of Pennsylvania, comparative literature and literary theory
Criminal Spirit: Formations of Race and Religion in the Americas

Jeffrey Dyer • Boston University, musicology and ethnomusicology
Spectral Sounds, Spectral Time: Music and Sound, Ritual, and the Ethics of Historicity in Cambodia

Malay Firoz • Brown University, anthropology
Humanitarianism and the Resilience Paradox: The Ethical Quandaries of Aid in Jordan and Lebanon

Thalia Gigerenzer • Princeton University, anthropology
On Being Close: Changing Ideas of Love and Intimacy in Delhi’s Working-Class Muslim Neighborhoods

Tom Gilbert • University of California, Berkeley, interdisciplinary field studies and rhetoric
From Automation to Autonomy: The Moral Psychology of Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence

Craig Johnson • University of California, Berkeley, history
Theology Against Subversion: Conservative Catholics and Right Wing Paramilitaries after the Second Vatican Council

Brittany Leach • University of Virginia, politics
Death Before Birth: Theorizing Pregnant Embodiment, Reproductive Autonomy, and the Politics of Abortion

Louis Lu • Harvard University, history
The Dustbin of History: Archival Politics in Modern China

Hannah McElgunn • University of Chicago, anthropology and linguistics
Language at the Center of the Universe

María José Méndez • University of Minnesota, political science
The work of violence: Inside Central America’s illicit economies and socio-ethical worlds

Natalie Nesvaderani • Cornell University, anthropology
Visualizing ‘The Child Other’: Youth Advocacy, Ethics, & Independent Filmmaking in Iran

Larkin Philpot • University of Pittsburgh, philosophy
Aristotle on Self-love and Desire

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz • New York University, anthropology
East of Appalachia: The New Russian Turn in American Christianity

Leslie Sabiston • Columbia University, anthropology
Fear of Indigenous (dis)Orders: New Medico-legal Alliances for Capturing and Managing Indigenous Life in Canada

Nadia Sariahmed-Belhadj • Columbia University, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies
The Battles of Algiers: popular politics of the Algerian Revolution

Keshav Singh • UNC Chapel Hill, philosophy
Rational Agency and Normative Achievement

Dwight Tanner • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, English and comparative literature
In the End: Apocalyptic Literature, Minoritarian Identity, and Hopeless Futurity

Amy Zanoni • Rutgers University, history
Poor Health: Retrenchment and Resistance in Chicago’s Public Hospital, 1945-2002

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