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2018 Arts & Humanities Fellows announced

Four of the six Texas A&M University faculty members recently named 2018 Arts & Humanities Fellows are from the College of Liberal Arts, which has been awarded each spring since 2015.

by Heather Rodriguez ’04

Four of the six Texas A&M University faculty members recently named 2018 Arts & Humanities Fellows are from the College of Liberal Arts, which has been awarded each spring since 2015. All recipients were honored at an awards luncheon on Monday at the University Club in Rudder Tower. Each fellowship includes a three-year grant of $15,000 to support a scholarly project in the humanities or creative work in the arts.

Texas A&M Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau said, “We are excited about the outstanding projects that our 2018 Arts & Humanities Fellows will pursue and the new scholarship they will create over the next three years. While it is sometimes easy to be dazzled by the products of science and technology, we must never forget that the arts and humanities are the lifeblood of civilization. With the support of these fellowships, scholars at Texas A&M will continue to advance the visibility and vibrancy of research here in the arts and humanities.”

The recipients from the College of Liberal Arts are:

Evan Haefeli, associate professor in the Department of History, College of Liberal Arts, will complete a new book, Anti-popery: The First Bias of American Freedom, which will take a long view of anti-Catholicism from colonial America into the 20th century to reveal the surprising and unpredictable ways that anti-popery ideology has shaped the American experience of freedom.

Rumya Putcha, assistant professor in the Department of Performance Studies, College of Liberal Arts, will fund essential research on her second book project, Namaste Nation: Commercial Yoga Industries and Neo-Orientalism in the 21st Century America. This project will identify the crucial role of this leisure activity in 21st century gender and racial formation.

Vanita Reddy, associate professor in the Department of English/Women’s and Gender Studies, College of Liberal Arts, will visit three essential archives to support her current book, Global Intimacies, which will examine cultural production from the global South Asian diaspora—North America, East Africa, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean—in relation to black and indigenous populations.

Nancy Warren, professor in the Department of English, College of Liberal Arts, will analyze legacies of medieval religion in the cultures and texts of the three major colonizing populations of the Americas: English, French, and Spanish, for a new book, Hemispheric Medievalisms: The “Old Religion” in the New World, 1550-1850.

For more information about the Arts & Humanities Fellows, as well as a complete list of winners, click here.