History Professor receives Guggenheim

Posted 04/15/02

Bruce Nelson, Professor of History at Dartmouth College, has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to support completion of a book that explores the relationship between Irish nationalism and anti-colonial sentiments in the early 20th century.

Among other topics, the project investigates how Black intellectuals of the early 1900s, including leaders such as Marcus Garvey and author Claude McKay, identified with the anti-colonial ideas espoused by the leaders of the Irish Diaspora.

A former assembly plant worker and union activist, Nelson's scholarly interests include labor unions and civil rights. After earning degrees in religion at Princeton University and in history at the University of California Berkeley, he published his first book, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen and Unionism in the 1930s in 1988. The book received the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Most recently, Nelson completed Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (2001), which examines the way class and race intersected in American society during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nelson's other awards and honors include fellowships from the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Humanities Center. He also has received Dartmouth's Distinguished Teaching Award (1988) and the Class of 1962 Faculty Fellowship for excellence in scholarship and teaching.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards fellowships on the basis of notable professional achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The 2002 Fellowship winners include more than 184 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 2,800 applicants for awards totaling more than $6.75 million. The average award given to individual recipients is $37,000.

Since 1925, the foundation has granted more than $200 million in fellowships to nearly 15,000 individuals. Past fellows include Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Linus Pauling, Martha Graham, Philip Roth and Eudora Welty, among others.

Other Dartmouth faculty who have received Guggenheim fellowships in recent years include Marianne Hirsch, Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature; Richard Wright, Professor of Geography; Anne Sa'adah, the Joel Parker Professor of Law and Political Science; Pamela Crossley, Professor of History and Chair of the Asian Studies Program, and Lev Loseff, Professor of Russian.