Two members of the History Department Faculty, Anthony Barbieri and Sherene Seikaly were awarded two prestigious National Endowment of Humanities grants and fellowships. NEH Fellowships are a set of competitive fellowships awarded to individual scholars pursuing projects that embody “exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clear writing.” Projects are evaluated based on their value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. It is a matter of great honor that two members of the History Department Faculty were chosen as recipients of this set of awards this year.
Anthony Barbieri who was awarded a full-year fellowship to work on a translation and critical annotation of a Han Dynasty manuscript called the Discourses on Salt and Iron (Yantielun 鹽鐵論). The text, dating to the first century BCE, is about an imperial court debate about abolishing state monopolies on iron and salt production that had been imposed four decades previously. Click here to read more about this project.
Sherene Seikaly, also awarded a full-year fellowship, will be working on her book From Baltimore to Beirut. This book uses the life of Naim Cotran (c. 1877-1961) to understand Levantine mobility and the challenges faced by the Palestinian upper-middle classes at the turn of the twentieth century.
See The Current‘s feature about this achievement here.