National Hispanic Heritage Month comes to a close today, October 15. There are many ways to recognize the importance of Hispanic and Latin American peoples to world culture. One of the ways the Kluge Center recognizes that presence is through the Jay I. Kislak Fellowships for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas.
The John W. Kluge Center now offers two short-term fellowships annually for independent scholars, students, and college and university faculty to conduct residential research based on items from the Kislak Collection. Two Kislak fellowships are to be awarded each year. Each Kislak Fellowship will be for a period of three months with a stipend of $4,200 per month. The deadline for Fellowship applications is the last day of Hispanic Heritage Month, October 15.
Among the recent holders of the Kislak Fellowship are:
- Patricia O’Brien, Georgetown University, “Encircling World: English Colonial Power, Race and Gender from the Caribbean to the East.” Dr. O’Brien currently is at the Australian National University on an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.
- Michele Navakas, Texas Tech University, “Founding Florida: Language and Geography at the Edge of America.” At the end of her fellowship Dr. Navakas received an appointment as Assistant Professor at Miami University, where she is working on the final revisions of her book “Founding Florida,” which was completed during the Kislak Fellowship.
- Surekha Davies, Western Connecticut State University, “Of Monsters and Men: Maps, Ethnography and the Americas in Renaissance Europe.” Dr. Davies’ book “Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human” was completed under the Kislak Fellowship and is scheduled for publication in April 2016.
- Benjamin Reed, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, “Oration Devotion in Mexico City, 1657-1821.” Ben Reed is currently completing his Ph.D. at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Chet Van Duzer, Independent Scholar, “The Legends on Martin Waldseemuller’s Carta marina of 1516.” During his fellowship Chet Van Duzer also worked with John Hessler to complete “Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps” published in 2012. Van Duzer’s eighth book, “Apocalyptic Cartography,” is due out in December 2015.
- Anastasia Kalyuta, The Russian Museum of Ethnography, “Comparing Land Tenure Patterns among Mexica-Tenochca and Acolhua Nobility on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest and in the Early Colonial Period.” Dr. Kalyuta continues to work at the Russian Museum of Ethnography and recently completed another fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks.
The Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center joins with many other national institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in paying tribute to the Hispanic Americans who have so deeply enriched our shared national culture.