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Tedder & Rothman Doctoral Fellowships

In 2012, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, with the support of the Tedder Family Endowed Research Award in the Humanities, began a program to award summer fellowships to doctoral candidates working on humanities topics who have passed their qualifying exams by the application deadline. This fellowship may be used to cover research expenses, including travel, related to their dissertation project. Work on projects with interdisciplinary appeal is particularly encouraged. Additional awards may be granted with funds from the Rothman endowment. The most recent recipients are below:

2023-2024 Tedder Doctoral Fellows

Jeffrey Jones (Ph.D. Student, History)

“Ancient Obligations”: Imperial Subjecthood and Sovereignty in British Honduras and the Caribbean Basin, 1763—1862

This research examines how British colonial officials and the metropolitan public were captivated with borderlands of the Caribbean Basin, which were contested between both European and American empires as well as indigenous and Afro-indigenous polities. Chronically understudied and unappreciated within British imperial history, British Honduras functioned as a crucial imperial borderland for the British in Central America and was also the subject of intense fascination among the emerging British middle classes as a promising area for dreams of secure investments, fantastic returns, and a hideaway for scofflaws and vagabonds.

Aja Cacan (Ph.D. Student, Anthropology)

Sensing the Limits: Moving Matter and the Social Terrain of Sea Level Rise in Miami

Miami owes its existence to the defiance of limits. But rising sea levels are reasserting the power of matter to set the limits of human-environment relations. The boundary between land and water is central to Miami’s economy, identity, and history of segregation—so it is no surprise that today’s social environmental crisis is disproportionately affecting Miami’s Black communities. This project documents the growing visibility of sea level rise through sense, image, and human-environment relations, offering a more concrete language for what is at stake, and a path to confronting limits with equity in mind.

2023-2024 Rothman Doctoral Fellows

Monsunmola Adeojo (Ph.D. Student, English)

Hidden in Layered Robes: Indigenous Politics in the Religious Framework of Reverend Canon J.J. Ransome-Kuti

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of Rev. Canon J.J. Ransome-Kuti, a Yorùbá Anglican minister who worked under the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Abeokuta, Nigeria, from 1880 to 1930, when he died as a Reverend Canon. It analyzes his songs, trips to England, photographs and newspaper articles, and digitized works to discuss the religious values and indigenous ethos that shaped his expression of Christianity in the Yorùbá Anglican church. Adeojo’s research follows scholarship on the contributions of African missionaries to Christian indigenization, decolonial activism, and the intellectual history of Africa.

Helena Chen (Ph.D. Student, Art History)

From Paper to Bronze and Back Again: The Forging of Ancient Chinese Bronzes from the Mid-19th to the Early-20th Century

Bronze vessels of ancient China are the most in-demand, yet the most controversial artifacts in the history of Chinese antiquity collecting. The contemporary antiquity markets are flooded with fake Chinese bronzes produced by an equally sizable forgery industry. The problem of forgery in art markets is certainly not unique to Chinese art. What is special about the Chinese case is the close linkage—a symbiosis—between the manufacturing of forgery and the scholarship of Chinese antiquity. This dissertation explores this interdependent relationship between bronze forgery and serious scholarship in China from the mid-19th to the early-20th century.

Tyler Cline (Ph.D. Student, History)

To Slake the Thirst of Liberty: Migration, Race, and the Transformation of Transnational Anglo-Saxonism, 1830-1890

This dissertation examines the 19th-century intellectual history of Anglo-Saxonism, a transnational discourse that argued that the Protestant origins of the English-speaking world, its democratic and representative political institutions, and emerging notions of hardened racial hierarchies ensured its adherents’ right to dominate society. Ideas of Anglo-Saxon superiority permeated both the United States and the British Empire, circulating through networks that transcended national and imperial boundaries. The tenets of Anglo-Saxonism helped reshape conceptions of American, Canadian, and British institutions of self-governance by delimiting who could participate within the political process and who were simply subject to it.

Neha Kohli (Ph.D. Student, Geography)

The Matter of Islands: Examining Island Narratives and Political Life in the Eastern Indian Ocean

This project examines how claims to territory in the Indian Ocean are supported by diverse political possibilities of physical landscapes and narratives about islands. Specifically, it studies the case of India and the Nicobar Islands. The ways in which territory is constructed and negotiated by the state and Indigenous communities is less explored in scholarship on India’s Island geographies. Through historical and anthropological methods, this project addresses this gap by studying territorial processes as historical, racial, and material processes. Drawing on political ecology, the study advances a novel theoretical framework to study island contexts, especially in South Asia.

Iblin Edelweiss Murillo Lafuente (Ph.D. Student, Sociology)

Anti-ableist Feminist Resistance: How Women with Disabilities in the Global South Resist Violence through Feminist Social Movements

This research concerns the practices that women with disabilities employ to resist state and domestic violence in Bolivia. It intervenes in scholarship on social movements, disability studies, and gender studies to describe the political agency that women with disabilities exercise in a context where human rights are consistently violated due to discrimination based on ableism and gender inequality. The situation of women with disabilities in the Global South has largely been ignored in scholarly conversations, feminist activist organizations, and public policies to prevent violence against women. The dissertation asks how women with disabilities use art and activism to resist violence and demand full citizenship.

Jeana Melilli (Ph.D. Student, Music)

Unfootnoting Women: Expanding the Historical Narrative of the 18th Century Trio and Accompanied Sonatas

The trio sonata, featuring two treble lines and a bass, was the most popular instrumental genre in the late-18th century. Women musicians commissioned, performed, and composed these works. The keyboardist Catherine Hamilton in Naples, mentioned in passing by Charles Burney and given high praise, and the composer and Sicilian nun Cecilia Macca exemplify the disparate avenues of musicking in which women engaged. Using their work, this research upends the narrative of constraint and dismissal of women’s contributions to music in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a location often ignored in the historical narrative.

Joshua Perlin (Ph.D. Student, Psychology)

Whose Narrative? Which Christianity?: Investigating the Impact of Religious Socioecology on the Narrative Identities of High and Low Church Anglicans

Religions are lived out: They take place in particular environments (e.g., churches) and are made up of regular social practices within those environments. Together, these environments and practices constitute the “socioecology” of religious life. However, most scholarship on religions neglect these concrete and particular aspects of how individuals are shaped and how they understand their lives. This dissertation investigates the influence of religious socioecology on individuals’ life stories using a single religious tradition (Anglican Christianity) with a naturally occurring difference in socioecology (high vs. low church). High churches are traditional, ritualistic, and sacramental, whereas low churches are modern, informal, and focused on personal belief. The researcher will conduct fieldwork at two seminaries that exemplify this distinction. Field notes will generate a rich description of the religious socioecologies of both seminaries, and interviews will be analyzed with a team of researchers for narrative themes.

Yuanxin Wang (Ph.D. Student, Political Science)

Imperial Visions of the Family: Familial Imaginaries and Imperial Encounters between China and Britain, 1840-1912

This dissertation focuses on the entanglements of family and empire in modern sociopolitical discourse as the product of historical contingencies and representational strategies in the world of imperialisms. It problematizes the formation and circulation of various familial tropes and narratives during the encounters and confrontations between two imperial orders, China and Britain, in the 19th and early-20th centuries. The Fellowship will fund travel to the National Library of China to explore how Chinese intellectuals received, constructed, and utilized these “familial imaginaries” in anti-imperial discourse at the turn of the 20th century.

View Past Recipients