3 faculty awarded NEH fellowships, tying UT for 1st place

CAITLIN MULQUEEN Staff Writer

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded three UT faculty members from the College of Arts and Sciences prestigious NEH Fellowships, making UT one of just two universities to have three recipients in 2023 among the 70 humanities projects receiving fellowship.

Among the faculty at UT awarded for their outstanding studies is Manuela Ceballos, assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, for her project, “Between Dung and Blood: Ritual Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Mediterranean.”

Her research centers around the Western Mediterranean in the early modern period — a region with complex histories of interreligious exchange.

“My work deals with the stories of saints from some of these different religious communities who were the children or grandchildren of converts, and how they and their followers engaged with that family history of conversion,” Ceballos said.

Ceballos believes her efforts have proven to be time well spent. Upon receiving the grant, she described the recognition as both “great and a little daunting.”

“Doing this kind of work can be isolating, so having your peers read your writing and encourage the process can be very meaningful.”

Ceballos plans on using the fellowship year to finish her book and begin a new project shortly after.

In the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, Mary McAlpin, professor of French, was selected for her project “Rationalizing Rape: The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France.”

McAlpin, a specialist in eighteenth-century French studies argues in her project that “the Enlightenment turn away from the authority of religion, toward that of reason and science, resulted in a new vision of female sexuality as fundamentally contradictory.”

“I look at medical texts, novels and socio-political works to argue that this novel assumption about the ‘natural’ sex act — that a woman’s ‘no’ always means ‘yes’— worked to efface women’s sexual autonomy, with lasting consequences as the recent #MeToo movement demonstrates,” McAlpin said.

She has been conducting research in La Bibliothèque Nationale (French National Library) and elsewhere for seven years in addition to the humanities work that she has built slowly throughout her entire professional career and prior studies.

Still, McAlpin was surprised to receive the grant.

“The NEH fellowship is so highly competitive. There is always an element of luck in getting an award like the NEH; there are so many worthy projects out there, and too little funding for the humanities,” McAlpin said.

Moving forward, McAlpin plans on finishing her book, looking forward to seeing it published, reviewed and cited.

Another recipient in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures is Daniel Magilow, who was selected for his project “Disinformation and the Illustrierter Beobachter, 1926-1945,” a history on the official illustrated magazine of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party), which was founded in 1926 and published until March 1945 — only weeks before the end of World War II.

“These weekly glossy tabloids were as popular in their day as cable TV and the internet are now,” Magilow said. “My project is to study the strategies of misinformation and disinformation in the Illustrierter Beobachter to see what they can tell us about how extremist media erode confidence in democracy and its institutions.”

Magilow has been researching since starting graduate school in the mid-1990s and since he began working at UT in 2006. He began working specifically on this specific project in 2014.

Much like Ceballos and McAlpin, Magilow remains humble when talking about his successes.

“While I do think I have a compelling project, there’s a lot of luck involved, too,” Magilow said. “Grant funding in the humanities is mainly about playing the law of averages because there is just so little of it… My strategy has, out of necessity, been to apply year after year after year after year and just try not to take the annual ritual of receiving my NEH rejection letter too personally.”

Anticipating a rejection, Magilow’s first reaction was disbelief.

“I thought that the NEH might have made a technical error whereby they accidentally sent all the applicants a ‘congratulations’ email and they would soon retract it,” Magilow said.

A follow up email never came, though. Magilow is planning to research and write the book he proposed and have something to show for it.

“I think we too often forget this important point,” Magilow said. “While it’s terrific when UT professors get prestigious grants, we should be celebrating and writing Beacon articles about the products that these grants make possible. The grant is only a key phase at the beginning of the journey, not the destination.”

Just as notable as the individual achievements is the collective fact that UT is one of just two universities to have three faculty receive an NEH Fellowship.

Alan Rutenberg, research development manager in UT’s Office of Research, Innovation and Economic Development, explained the history of the humanities fellowships at UT and the progress that has been made in supporting them.

“In 2004 the Office of Research initiated a program to support humanities fellowships. In the period since 2004, UT ranks 10th in the country among all universities, public and private, in the number of NEH fellowships received,” Rutenberg said.

Ceballos sees the stat as a testament to the quality of humanities research at UT.

“In my case, the help of (Rutenberg) at the Office of Research was crucial, so I hope UT continues to provide this kind of support for faculty,” Ceballos said.

Support seems to be the general quality recipients are wanting to see for the rest of the humanities department and the many fields of study within it.

“I think the high quality of the work done by the humanities professors at UT is too often overlooked by our administrations,” McAlpin said. “We do not bring in the big bucks, but we do consider the big ideas, both in our research and in our classroom. We challenge students’ assumptions, in a good way, and in the process change lives by honing in on students’ critical abilities. I would love to see more funding for the humanities at UT, both in terms of professor lines and research opportunities.”

Magilow shared that the funding rate for this year’s NEH faculty fellowships was less than 7%. 70 fellowships were given out of the 1,029 applicants.

Although there has been progress made in the field of humanities research at UT, Magilow got straight to the point about his feelings on the availability of grants.

“There needs to be more funding for research in the humanities.”