Past Recipients of Fellowships

MSU Fellowship

2001: Javier Pescador, Assistant Professor of History, for his proposal "Playing in America: Organized Sports and Mexican/Latino Communities in the Great Lakes Region, 1940-2001." The project analyzes the impact of organized sports on Mexican and Latino communities in Metro-Detroit and Chicago from an interdisciplinary perspective. Professor Pescador argues that "organized sports among Mexican communities are forming strong roots with a U.S. working class and leisure culture that emphasizes hard work, discipline, manhood, individuality and competitiveness and reflects both shortcomings and aspirations of the Mexican/Latino experiences in the U.S." His CGLC fellowship will permit him to analyze interviews, oral histories, participant observations, archival and newspaper records to follow the history of five different soccer associations in Chicago and Detroit from 1940-2000.

Visiting Fellowship

2001: Francesco Melfi, of Cleveland Heights OH, for his proposal to conduct research on the pedagogical and linguistic strategies employed by the German-speaking Moravian missionary David Zeisberger (1721-1808) among the Delaware Indians and among the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy in the Great Lakes region during the 18th and early 19th centuries, for a book on the subject. Dr. Melfi, a linguist with Ph.D. in Hebrew literature at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, became interested in the history and geography of the Great Lakes after moving to Ohio, and commenced his intensive studies of native languages and Moravian settlements. For his research he will be using the Fliegel Indexes of the Moravian mission records on microfilm at the Michigan State University Libraries.

Residential Fellowship

2001: James W. Cook, Assistant Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Butler University. "Cracks in the White Republic: Race, Culture, and Transgression in the U.S. North, 1780-1865," is a study of interracial "cultures" that emerged in the United States between the dawn of emancipation and the Civil War. Dr. Cook argues that "in the broadest sense, I am writing a book about interracial 'transgressions': a cultural history of the people, places, and relationships which in one way or another violated the early Republic's emerging racial caste system."

2001: Wiliam Ralph Heath, Professor of English, Mount Saint Mary's College. "William Wells's Path" is an historical novel that uses the life of Wells, (an interpreter, Indian agent, and acculturated member of the Miami tribe who served both Native American communities and the federal government during the tumultuous conquest of the Northwest Territory by the United States), to illuminate his times and capture the meaning of a crucial period.