Four win grants from NEH, NEA

Posted 02/18/03, by Tamara Steinert

Fellowships will advance humanities research

Several Dartmouth faculty members have recently received prestigious national fellowships to further their work in the humanities.

Three of 167 individual research fellowships awarded this winter by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) were given to Dartmouth scholars. Associate Professor of History Judith Byfield and Associate Professor of Classics Roberta Stewart will receive $40,000 to support full-term work on their projects, while Associate Professor of English Barbara Will will receive $24,000 to support a shorter-term fellowship. Also, poet and English Professor Cleopatra Mathis was awarded a $20,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Byfield will use the NEH grant to continue work on her book about a Nigerian women's tax revolt. The project, which previously earned Byfield a Fulbright award in the fall, examines the interplay of gender and politics in Nigeria.

Stewart's award will allow her to continue research for her book on slave experience in the Roman Republic and empire. "I consider questions of selfhood, survival in slavery, the limits on a freed slave's experience of freedom and the particular problems that slavery created for slave women within the slave household and within their slave community," she explained.

The NEH grant will help Will complete her book about Gertrude Stein's translations of 32 speeches by Nazi collaborationist Marshal Philippe Petain. Will previously was awarded a Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a grant from the Leslie Humanities Center to support the project.

Mathis, who founded the College's current creative writing program, will use the NEA fellowship to work on her sixth book of poems. The fellowship is the second that she has received from the NEA in her career. Mathis also won the 2001 Jane Kenyon Award for her book, What to Tip the Boatman?

- Tamara Steinert

NEH Grant Recipients

• Judith Byfield, History

• Roberta Stewart, Classics

• Barbara Will, English

NEA Grant Recipient

• Cleopatra Mathis, English