Earlier this year, CIC launched the American Graduate Fellowships—a new program to support the most talented graduates of smaller, private liberal arts colleges who plan to pursue advanced work in the humanities. Finalists for the awards will be selected in December by a distinguished panel of humanities scholars. Every member of the review panel has received major awards for outstanding scholarship, teaching, or both. Three of them are also graduates of small liberal arts colleges themselves, so they will be hoping to find their younger counter­parts among the applicants.

Two fellowships, worth up to $50,000 each and renewable for a second year, will be awarded in each of the next five years. The awards can be used to support doctoral study at any of 23 independent research universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland. The eligible fields of study include history, philosophy, literature and languages, and fine arts. Full details about the program, including student eligibility requirements and application forms, are available here or by email from americangrad@cic.nche.edu. The application deadline is October 17, 2006.

The American Graduate Fellowships are made possible by a generous grant from the Wichita Falls Area Community Foundation, Wichita Falls, Texas.

Panelists for American Graduate Fellowships

Robert Pippin is Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago (IL). His work focuses on the modern German philosophical tradition (from Immanuel Kant to the present), contemporary Continental philosophy, moral theory, social and political philosophy, and theories of modernity, as well as various topics in ancient philosophy. Pippin is also interested in the intersection between philosophy and the fine arts (literature, art history, and film). He is the author of many books and articles, a popular visiting lecturer around the world, and the recipient of several awards for his teaching. In 2001 he received a Distinguished Achievement Award in the humanities from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Pippin earned his BA with a major in English from Trinity College (CT) and his PhD in Philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University.

William C. Jordan is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton University (NJ) and a former director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. He is the author of several books, including Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (1979); Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (1993); The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (1997), which was awarded the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America; and Europe in the High Middle Ages (2003). He has also edited a one-volume encyclopedia of the Middle Ages for elementary school students and a four-volume version for middle school students. In 2003 he received Princeton’s Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities. His current research focuses on church-state relations in the 13th and early-14th centuries. Jordan earned his bachelor’s degree from Ripon College (WI) and his PhD from Princeton.

Suzanne Preston Blier is Allen Whitehill Clowes Chair of Fine Arts and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Since earning her PhD in art history from Columbia University (NY), Blier has focused on bringing African art into the mainstream of art historical study. Her many books include The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (1987), which received the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the African Studies Association; African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (1995), which received the Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association; and African Royal Art: The Majesty of Form (1998). She has also curated exhibitions of African art, conducted extensive research in the West African countries of Benin and Togo, and served as editor-in-chief for Baobab: Visual Sources in African Visual Culture, an innovative digital media project at Harvard. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and a Fulbright-Hays Award. She earned her BA at the University of Vermont.

Andrew Delbanco is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University (NY), where he teaches in the Department of English & Comparative Literature and the Department of History and directs the American Studies program. His books include The Puritan Ordeal (1989), which won the Lionel Trilling Award at Columbia; The Death of Satan (1995); Required Reading (1997); and Melville: His World and Work (2005). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, among others. His many honors include membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “America’s Best Social Critic” (Time Magazine, 2001), New York State Scholar of the Year (New York Council for the Humanities, 2003), and Guggenheim, NEH, and New York Public Library fellowships. Delbanco served as Vice President of the PEN American Center and is currently a trustee of the Library of America. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard.

Niall W. Slater is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek at Emory University (GA). An expert on ancient theater and the ancient novel, he is also interested in language, literature, and culture more broadly. Slater is the author of several books, including Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (1985) and Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (2002), and numerous scholarly articles. He has been a visiting fellow at the University of St. Andrews, Ohio State University, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and other leading institutions in the United States, Germany, and Australia. In 1999 he received the Williams Award for Distinguished Teaching at Emory. Since 2003 he has served as president of Phi Beta Kappa. Slater was educated at The College of Wooster (OH) where he graduated as valedictorian, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and Princeton University.