Darren Dochuk
Two Notre Dame Department of History faculty members — Associate Professors Darren Dochuk and Karen Graubart — were offered fellowships last week from the National Endowment for the Humanities, continuing the University’s record success winning support for humanities research.
Faculty in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have won a total of 61 NEH fellowships since 1999 — more than any other private university in the country.
“Notre Dame’s remarkable success in earning NEH fellowships is the result of the outstanding quality of our faculty across a range of disciplines,” said John McGreevy, I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, “as well as an excellent support structure in the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.”
Dochuk — who also received an NEH Public Scholar award — will spend the 2017–18 academic year completing his book project, Anointed With Oil: God and Black Gold in America’s Century, which explores the connections between religion and the U.S. oil industry.
Karen Graubart
Dochuk’s winning project was inspired by research he conducted in Texas and Oklahoma for his first book, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2011), which won prizes from the Society of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians.
“It struck me that there might be something to say about how the oil patch has its own religious culture and by extension its own political culture,” he said. “Lots of oil men and women with wealth and power based on oil have shaped local religious institutions. The combination of that convinced me that there was a story to be told about the marriage of oil and religion in American life.”
Graubart will use her fellowship to finish her book, tentatively titled Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Iberian Atlantic, 1400–1650.
The project examines how legal jurisdiction shaped the formation of ethnic and racial classification across the Iberian empire.
“I am thrilled to have a year free of other obligations to complete writing my new book,” she said. “I have spent a decade now compiling the sources and doing the historical analysis, and this fellowship year will allow me to bring the project to completion.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on December 22, 2016.