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Woodrow Wilson News & Publications
FOR RELEASE: Friday, May 16, 2008
CONTACT: Cynthia Daniels, Ph.D., Director, Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowships,
(609) 452-7007 x307
Beverly Sanford, Director of Communications,
(609) 452-7007 x181
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NEWCOMBE DISSERTATION FELLOWS SELECTED FOR 2008
Prestigious Awards to Emerging Scholars of Religious and Ethical Values Announced at Woodrow Wilson Foundation
PRINCETON, N.J.—The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has named 29 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows for the 2008-09 academic year. The Newcombe Fellows—doctoral candidates in the final year of writing dissertations that address religious and ethical values—receive a 12-month award of $23,000.
The 2008 Newcombe Fellows are writing on such topics as these:
- The influence of eugenics, as a social value of early 20th-century France, on modern Latin American architecture
- The ways in which religious groups’ claims of miracles shaped America’s "republican experiment" in the years following the Revolutionary War
- A comparison of Catholic and Islamic struggles with liberal democracy
- The impact of pre-Revolutionary China’s lay Buddhists on contemporary Chinese views of religion and social engagement
- The influence of hip hop music on African-American girls' sense of family and community values
This year’s Fellows represent ten fields of study, including anthropology, history, philosophy, music, and art, and come from 20 institutions nationwide. (See below for the full list of the 2008 Fellows.)
Funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation of Princeton, New Jersey, the Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship is the nation’s largest and most prestigious such award for Ph.D. students addressing ethical and religious questions in the humanities and social sciences. Since its inception in 1981, the Newcombe Fellowship has supported more than 1,000 doctoral candidates, many of whom are now noted faculty at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and abroad. For more information, visit http://www.woodrow.org/newcombe.
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation identifies and develops the best minds for the nation’s most important challenges. In these areas of challenge, the Foundation awards fellowships to enrich human resources, works to improve public policy, and assists organizations and institutions in enhancing practice in the U.S. and abroad.
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Nosheen Ali • Development Sociology, Cornell University
Dealing with Difference: The Cultural Politics of Sectarianism in the Northern Areas, Pakistan
Patricia Arzaga • Music, University of Chicago
La Virtù fatta canora (Melodious Virtue): Staging Early Modern Values at the Court of Leopold I (1658-1705)
Elizabeth Barre • Religion, Florida State University
Reconciled to Liberty: Catholics, Muslims, and the Possibility of Overlapping Consensus
Andrew Blom • Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago
Justice with Humanity: Hugo Grotius and the Ethical Basis of International Affairs
Angus Burgin • History, Harvard University
The Intellectual Origins of Modern American Conservatism
Ezra Davidson • History, New York University
American Jihad?: The U.S. and the Construction of Transnational Islamic Radicalism
David Dick • Philosophy, University of Michigan
Ethics and the Possibility of Failure: Getting it Right about Getting it Wrong
Diana Finnegan • Languages and Cultures of Asia, University of Wisconsin
Friendship in Buddhist Monasticism: Ethics and Narrative in the Mulasarvastivadavinaya
Lauren Fleming • Philosophy, Georgetown University
The Normativity of Personal Commitments
Gregg Gardner • Religion, Princeton University
Social Justice and Charity in Early Rabbinic Judaism
Daniel Groll • Philosophy, University of Chicago
“It's My Life and I'll Do What I Want”: The Value of Autonomy
Hans Martin Hägglund • Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Chronolibidinal Reading: Proust and the Time of Desire
Joseph Hankins • Anthropology, University of Chicago
Working through Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan
James Hebbeler • Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
Critical Belief in the Unconditioned: Kant's Antinomy as a Positive Response to Skepticism about Reason
Nicolas Howe • Geography, University of California - Los Angeles
Sacred Jurisdictions: Church, State, and the American Civic Landscape
James Jessup • History, University of California - Berkeley
Worldly Salvation: The Lay Buddhist Movement and Urban Society in Republican China, 1920-1937
Adam Jortner • History, University of Virginia
Reign of Witches: A Political History of the Supernatural in America, 1780-1838
Jacob Klein • Philosophy, Cornell University
Nature and Reason in Stoic Ethics
Daniel Koltonski • Philosophy, Cornell University
Political Obligations in a Democracy
Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz • History, Indiana University
“Could I not do something for the cause?”: The Brown Women, Antislavery Reform, & American Memory of Militant Abolitionism, 1833–1926
Katherine Lemons • Anthropology and Rhetoric, University of California - Berkeley
Law Beyond the Law: Practices of Muslim Personal Law in Contemporary India
Fabiola López-Durán • Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Eugenics in the Garden: Architecture, Medicine, and Landscape from France to Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century
Kelby Mason • Philosophy, Rutgers University
Virtue, Happiness and Moral Judgement: Aristotle Meets Empirical Moral Psychology
Masaki Matsubara • Asian Religions, Cornell University
Remembering Hakuin: Memory, Identity, and Invention in Contemporary Japanese Zen
Ryan Skinner • Music, Columbia University
Artistiya: Popular Music and Personhood in Postcolonial Bamako, Mali
Kabir Tambar • Anthropology, University of Chicago
Stones of Kerbela: Secularism and Theology among the Alevi in Turkey
Farzin Vejdani • History, Yale University
Secularizing Iran: Cultural Nationalism and the Quest for Authenticity 1906-1941
Keith Woodhouse • History, University of Wisconsin
A Subversive Nature: Radical Environmentalism in the Late-Twentieth-Century United States
Jennifer Woodruff • Music, Duke University
Learning to Listen, Learning to Be: African-American Girls and Hip Hop at a Durham, NC Boys and Girls' Club