Williams College Oakley Center Announces Fellowships

04:06PM / Friday, July 29, 2011

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Eight faculty members and two students have received fellowships for research during the 2011-2012 academic year at Williams College's Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Established in 1985 to provide support for faculty research and development, the Oakley Center facilitates intellectual exchange and collaboration among faculty members and student fellows whose research and teaching cross or elude disciplinary boundaries.

Faculty members on leave are eligible for resident fellowships, which provide financial support for research and office space at the center. In exchange, they are asked to participate in weekly lunchtime forums to present or informally discuss their works-in-progress.

The Oakley Center additionally designates two of their resident fellows as Herbert H. Lehman Fellows. The Lehman Fellowships are awarded to Oakley fellowship projects with particular promise that pursue topics related to the arts, political leadership, or public service.

Each semester, a senior at Williams is named a Ruchman Fellow. Thanks to support from Allan B. Ruchman (1975) and Mark C. Ruchman, students who intend to pursue both graduate study and a career in teaching may apply for the fellowship, normally in conjunction with an independent study course or honors thesis. Ruchman Fellows receive $1,000 stipends to offset research costs.

The Oakley Center recently named Leyla Rouhi, the John T. and John B. McCoy Professor of Romance Languages, as its new director. Rouhi was named Massachusetts Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2010. On campus she has been chairman of both the Executive Committee for the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and of the Romance languages department, while also actively supporting the Program in Comparative Literature.

Full-Year Fellows

Jessica Chapman, associate professor of history, will pursue "From Disorder to Dictatorship: The Domestic and International History of Ngo Dihn Diem's Construction of South Vietnam, 1953-1956" as a Herbert H. Lehman Fellow of the center. Chapman's research focuses on modern Vietnam, French decolonization, and the Cold War and utilizes cultural elements to better explain foreign relations. She earned her B.A. at Valparaiso University, and her  master's degree and doctorate from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Jennifer Randall Crosby, assistant professor of psychology, will be pursuing her research interests in how social expectations shape intergroup interactions with "Defining Discrimination and Directing Responses: Why Group Membership Matters." She received her bachelor's degree and doctorate at Stanford University.

Bruce Redford, professor of art history and English at Boston University, will serve as the Clark-Oakley Fellow for the year, during which he will work on "The Anxiety of Affluence: Picturing the Elite in Van Dyck, Reynolds and Sargent" at both the Oakley Center and the Clark Art Institute. He received bachelor's degrees from Brown University and the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Neil Roberts, assistant professor of Africana studies and faculty affiliate in political science, will continue working on "Freedom as Marronage," a book-in-progress based on his dissertation. Roberts is interested in the application of political theory to concepts of freedom and agency. He attended Brown University as an undergraduate and earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago.

Vincent Schleitwiler, assistant professor of English and faculty affiliate in Africana Studies, will work on a manuscript titled, "In the Place of the 'Black Pacific': Love and Letters Along the Color Line." His research interests include African American, Asian American, and Anglophone Filipino literatures. He received his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and his master's and doctorate from the University of Washington.

Janneke van de Stadt, associate professor of Russian and comparative literature and department head for the German-Russian Department, will work on "Musical Chairs: An Examination of Musical Debates in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature." She received a bachlor's degree from Amherst College and her masters and doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Fall 2011 Fellows

J. Adam Century, a senior, is the Ruchman Student Fellow for the fall. An Asian studies major, he is a senior writer on The Williams Record, and sits on the Junior Advisory Group for the History Department. His Oakley Fellowship project is titled, "The Changing Role of the Internet as the de facto Public Sphere in Contemporary Chinese Society."

Amy Strahler Holzapfel, assistant professor of theater, will study "Reality Effects: Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama," which examines the influence of painting and photography on the styles of realism and naturalism in theater. Her interests span a number of fields, including medical theater, gender as it relates to performance, 19th-century theater, and contemporary German theater. She received her master of fine arts and doctor of fine arts in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama.

Spring 2012 Fellows

Evelyn Denham, a senior, will be the spring Ruchman Student Fellow studying "Between Sublime Porte and Hofburg: The Negotiation of Power and Space at Eighteenth-Century Central European Courts." She spent the 2010-2011 academic year at the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford University.

Gail Newman, the Harold J. Henry Professor of German and Comparative Literature, will work on "'A Joy to be Hidden, a Disaster Not to be Found': Language, Silence and Self from Heinrich von Kleist to Gerhard Roth." Her academic interests include German Romanticism, psychoanalytic theory, and twentieth-century Austria. On campus, Newman is active with the Urban Scholars program, the Multicultural Center, and the Summer Humanities and Social Sciences Program. She received her bachelor's at Northwestern and doctorate at the University of Minnesota.