Nisse, Garrett Awarded Humanities Fellowship

Ruth Nisse, associate professor of English, and Matthew Garrett, assistant professor of English, received a 2011-12 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship.

The ACLS is a competitive fellowship for scholars in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences. Applications are peer reviewed by scholars in the applicant’s field. The fellowship is designed to provide scholars with devoted time for their research and writing. Seventy national scholarly organizations below to the ACLS.

Nisse will use her fellowship to complete her book called Jacob’s Shipwreck.

“The book focuses on Jewish-Christian relations and the transmission of ancient texts into both medieval Latin and Hebrew traditions,” Nisse says.

Garrett will use the award to complete his first book, Episodic Poetics in the Early American Republic. The book traces the evolution of episodic writing in early American culture, including prose, novels, memoirs and linked serial essays. Garrett shows how, in ways both magisterial and mundane, how episodic forms gave variegated shape to the social, political, and economic conflicts that defined the early U.S. republic.

“It’s a literary history of the episode, that odd little narrative unit that literary critics often ignore because episodes don’t always add up to proper plots,” he says.