Spring 2019 Fellows

The recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, Stewart is working on a project titled “The New Maid: African American Women and Domestic Service During the New Deal," which provides a much needed social and cultural history of African American women who labored as household workers during the New Deal.

Jason Radley’s work focuses on identifying neural pathways in the brain that are capable of reducing the negative effects of stress on the individual. His laboratory has recently identified a novel circuit in the rodent brain, whose malfunction may improve understanding of stress-related mental disorders. During his semester as an Obermann Fellow-in-Residence project, Dr. Radley will investigate the clinical literature to identify links between his findings and human brain imaging data, and complete a manuscript for publication and presentation at professional meetings.

Supp-Montgomerie is working on a book project titled "Fault Lines: The Religious Infrastructure of the World’s First Cabled Network, which traces the involvement of religion—particularly American Protestantism—in creating and defining networks. At the advent of network technology, missionaries marketed telegraphs around the world, Christian tropes infused sustaining enthusiasm into American public discourse about telegraphy, new religious communities indelibly affiliated networks with utopianism, and religious forms of communication marked the idiomatic conventions of networks.

Lisa Heineman teaches courses on Germany, Europe, human rights, and gender and sexuality. Her research has addressed gender and sexuality in post-Nazi and post-Holocaust memory as well as the social and political work of recovery from atrocity. She has explored the intersection of scholarship and storytelling through memoir, historical nonfiction, and theater; and she has developed teaching and community resources to explore the relevance of historical authoritarianism for understanding our contemporary world.

Espinosa is working on a book project, "Fighting Fever in the Caribbean: Medicine and Empire, 1650-1902." This work introduces the development and application of key medical ideas of yellow fever from 1650 to 1900—from the benefits of elevation to the presumed threat of filthy conditions, from the idea of acclimatization to theories of racial immunity—into the study of how that disease shaped the struggle for empire at this intersection of the Atlantic world.