Brenda Stevenson, a professor at UCLA who specializes in African-American history, has been appointed a Fellow of the National Humanities Center.
She is among 37 distinguished scholars from 32 institutions across the United States and eight foreign countries to be chosen to work on a wide array of projects at the National Humanities Center. Each scholar will have the opportunity to share ideas in seminars, lectures and conferences at the center, located at Research Triangle in North Carolina.
Geoffrey Harpham, director of the National Humanities Center, said, “This is a superb group of scholars representing a wide range of humanistic fields. It’s a privilege to be able to support their work.”
The National Humanities Center awards a total of $1.6 million in fellowship grants to enable scholars to take leave from their normal academic duties and pursue research at the center. This funding is made possible by the center’s endowment, by grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by contributions from alumni and friends of the center.
During the fall, Stevenson will be in residence there and work on her next book whose working title is "Fanny's World of Women: Generations of Enslaved Black Females in North America, 1620-1860," (John Hope Franklin Fellowship). The book will focus on the lives of slave women in the United States from colonial times through the antebellum era.
Professor Stevenson is the ninth member of the UCLA faculty to be selected as a fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Snce 1978, the center has awarded fellowships to more than 1,300 scholars in the humanities, whose work has resulted in the publication of more than 1,500 books in all fields of humanistic study. The center also sponsors programs to strengthen the teaching of the humanities in secondary and higher education.
