Sep 12, 2023
Gale and NACBS Award Fellowships to Five Scholars to Support British Studies and Decolonization/Diaspora Research
NACBS and Gale recently announced 2023 Gale-NACBS Digital Scholar Lab Fellows.
A full press release can be found here.
Gale and NACBS congratulate the following candidates who were awarded the fellowships for the 2023 academic year:
Alexandrea Keith, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University, U.S. Project: “[O]ur art is our lives”: Black Women’s Theater Organizations as Political Activism Across the Anglophone African Diaspora explores how the legacies of Black women are made visible in digital primary sources. By comparing two of the first Black women–founded theater groups in Chicago and London, — the Negro Theatre Workshop (NTW) and the Kuumba Theatre Company — the project will contribute to scholarship on Black women’s global relationships with empire and colonialism.
Averill Earls, assistant professor, St. Olaf College, U.S. Project: Earls will conduct research connected to her book, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of SameSex Desire in Ireland, 1922–1970 and develop materials for a “Love & Sex in Modern Ireland” course. She will examine the ways qualitative evidence from Gale’s British Library Newspapers will contextualize if, when, and how public queerness was accepted in independent Ireland.
Raymond Hyser, Ph.D. candidate, University of Texas at Austin, U.S. Project: Hyser’s dissertation, “Caribbean Ceylon: Trans-Imperial Networks, Knowledge-Making, and Plantation Coffee in the Global Tropics,” uses coffee as an analytical vehicle to connect the Caribbean and South Asia in a trans-regional study that traces the inter-imperial agricultural knowledge networks that underpinned the interconnected expansion of British imperialism. His research will explore how British perceptions of empire and the tropics developed throughout the 19th century.
Tanner Ogle, Ph.D. candidate, Texas A&M University, U.S. Project: To develop class activities for an early American history survey course, Ogle will research the influence of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 on British imperial policy. By centering on this rebellion as a formative moment in British imperial history, his research not only contributes to reinterpreting the ideological origins of the American Revolution but challenges the traditional timelines of the Second British Empire and the American Revolution, which have traditionally started in 1763.
Thomas Sojka, Ph.D. candidate, Boston University, U.S. Project: For research connected to his dissertation, “Moving Beyond Mayfair: Rethinking Social Life in Interwar Britain,” Sojka will look at how Britons in the 1920s and 1930s understood the contemporary leisure landscape of London, its rural environs, and beyond. By focusing on the Bright Young People— an informal group of aristocratic and upper-class individuals active during the period—this project decenters London’s West End as the premier site of elite sociability and interrogates ideas of modern celebrity.