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Fellowships

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

The HRC awards up to three postdoctoral fellowships for two-year appointments.  The Fellowships are designed to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. Fellows teach two courses per academic year, and are expected to make significant progress in their research.

Applicants are eligible to apply from all humanities disciplines including, but not limited to, history, philosophy, languages, literature, linguistics, religious studies, art history and the arts. Proposals employing humanistic approaches are welcome from the social sciences, natural sciences, music, architecture, and engineering.

 

2008-2010 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows

 

Diana Bullen Presciutti, Ph.D. in History of Art (2008), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Presciutti’s dissertation "The Visual Culture of the Central Italian Foundling Hospital, 1400-1600" examines how visual images shaped perceptions of charity and played a crucial role in charity administration. While at Rice, Dr. Presciutti will work on a study of the visual culture of institutions of confinement, rehabilitation, and reintegration of problematic women and converted Jews and Muslims in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy. She will teach in the Department of Art History during her appointment. Click here to download the course flier.

 
 

Adrian Weimer, Ph.D. in Religion (2008), Harvard University. Dr. Weimer’s dissertation "Protestant Saints: Martyrdom and the Meaning of Sanctity in Early New England" demonstrates that early colonists responded to personal hardships in highly conventionalized manner as a way to connect to holy exemplars in the Bible and in history. During the term of her fellowship, Dr. Weimer will expand her project to include Quaker, Baptist and separatist communities and will trace these rituals of affliction into the first decades of the eighteenth century. She will teach in the Department of Religious Studies.

 
 

Matthew Wilkens, Ph.D. in Literature (2006), Duke University. Dr. Wilkins’ dissertation “Points and Lines: Allegory, Event and the End of American Modernism” examines how allegory and metaphor are used in the professional literature of the natural sciences and how this use intensifies during periods of large-scale transformations in accepted professional practice. Dr. Wilkins’ most recent research involves computational and algorithmic methods to study the evolution of literary genres and styles across broad historical periods. At Rice, he will teach in the Department of English. Click here to download the course flier for ENGL 397.

 

Previous Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows

  • 2006-2008 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows

Pei2 Pei Koay, B.A. New School for Social Research; M.A. (1995) University of Toronto; Ph.D. (2003) Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Dr. Koay's dissertation, (Re)presenting Human Population Database Projects: Virtually Designing and Siting Biomedical Ventures, examined certain impacts of web-based genetic and genomic representations of health especially regarding identity-making. Her current research interests include globalization of science, representations of science and technology, race and science, and feminist and postcolonial approaches to studying science and society. Dr. Koay has taught courses on global science, science and gender, and the philosophy of technology for the Department of Philosophy. Contact p2koay@rice.edu or x4226.
memo2 José Pastrano, B.A. University of California, Irvine; M.A. (2001), Ph.D. (2006) University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Pastrano's dissertation, Industrial Agriculture in the Peripheral South: State, Race, and the Making of a Migrant Working Class in Texas, 1887-1930, focuses on the importance of Mexican immigrant labor in the development of a commercial farming economy in Texas. Dr. Pastrano's current research examines the politics of a seasonal workforce. He has taught courses on Mexican American history, Migrant Labor in America, and 20th century Labor History in the Department of History. Contact jgp1@rice.edu or x5456.
laura2 Laura Isabel Serna, B.A., University of California, Berkeley; MTS (1997) , Ph.D. (2006) Harvard University.
In her dissertation We're Going Yankee: American Movies, Mexican Nationalism, Transnational Cinema, 1917-1935, Dr. Serna considers the social function ascribed to the consumption of American films in Mexico in the 1920s and the way that American mass culture was integrated into Mexico's postrevolutionary nation-building project. Her research examines the intersection of discourses on mass culture with debates about immigration, gender, and nationalism. A second project focuses on the early history of Spanish language television in the Southwest and its relationship to the formation of a "hispanic" market and Latino politics. Dr. Serna has taught courses in the English and History Departments on Histories of Silent Cinema, Consumer Culture in the Americas, and Culture and Nation in Mexico. Contact lserna@rice.edu or x2788.


  • 2004-2006 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows:

Thomas H. Chivens (Ph.D. 2004 North Carolina University at Chapel Hill, anthropology)
Zoe Knox (Ph.D. 2002 Monash University)

  • 2002-2004 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows:

Michael Decker (Ph.D. 2001 Oxford University, modern history)
See Rice News article on Dr. Decker's contribution to Fondren Library's Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA) (03/17/05).
See News from Fondren 15.1 (Fall 05, p.4) article on TIMEA.
Nancy Deffebach (Ph.D. 2000 UT-Austin, art history)



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