Each year the program brings four outstanding young scholars from outside the university who have earned their doctorates within the past three years to come to Stanford on two-year fellowships. This year’s fellows were selected from a pool of nearly 600 candidates.
Following are the 2012-14 fellows and the Stanford departments they will join. All of them will receive their doctoral degrees this spring.
Elizabeth Bennett
ELIZABETH BENNETT, Art & Art History, will receive her doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley. Her dissertation is titled “Economies of Valuation and Desire: How New Deal Photography Remade the Old Order Amish.”
Beatrice Kitzinger
BEATRICE KITZINGER, Art & Art History, will receive her doctorate from Harvard University. Her dissertation is titled “Cross and Book: Late Carolingian Breton Gospel Illumination and the Instrumental Cross.”
PAUL ROQUET, East Asian Languages & Cultures, will receive his PhD from UC-Berkeley. His dissertation is titled “The Soft Fascinations: Ambient Subjectivity in Contemporary Japan.”
ADENA SPINGARN, English, will receive her doctorate from Harvard. Her dissertation is titled “Uncle Tom in the American Imagination: A Cultural Biography.”
Adena Spingarn
The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities offers a rare opportunity for postdoctoral fellows in the humanities to receive funding, mentoring and teaching experience as well as the time and financial support to research and publish books and articles.
Fellows enjoy substantial time to pursue research, teach two courses each year in an affiliated Stanford department and participate in an active program of scholarly exchanges as a cohort, with Stanford faculty and with outside visitors.
Founded more than 30 years ago with a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the interdisciplinary program offers postdoctoral fellowships in all of the humanities disciplines on a three-year rotating basis.
The Mellon Fellows Program aims to foster fellows’ careers through close engagement with established scholars, including Stanford faculty associated with the program, internal fellows and visiting fellows at the Stanford Humanities Center.
The program invites major figures in the humanities to present public lectures and participate in small group sessions with the fellows, who gather throughout the year to present their research to one another and for professional development workshops devoted to pedagogy, publishing and mentoring.
Mellon Fellows have taught hundreds of Stanford humanities courses, created and published many books and articles, and been selected to join the faculty of prestigious universities.
Associate Professors R. LANIER ANDERSON, philosophy, and J.P. DAUGHTON, history, direct the Stanford Mellon Fellowship program.
—CORRIE GOLDMAN
