ECU associate professor receives inaugural Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowship
Dr. Helena Feder, director of East Carolina University’s Great Books Program and associate professor of literature and environment, is one of the inaugural recipients of the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Scholars & Society Fellowship.
“Upon hearing the news, I felt honored to be chosen for this fellowship and overjoyed to be partnering with the North Carolina Museum of Art,” Feder said.
According to its website, the ACLS is a private nonprofit and is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences.
The fellowships, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, offer faculty who teach and advise doctoral students the opportunity to engage societal questions in their research, serve as ambassadors for humanities scholarship beyond the academy, and deepen their support for doctoral curricular innovation on their campuses.
Feder is receiving the fellowship for her project “Apprehensions: Six Senses of the World,” a volume of intertwined essays.
“This fellowship will give me a year to focus on my research,” she said.
According to Feder, “Apprehensions” develops six new theoretical nodes for the environmental humanities: balance as a sense of connection, intuition as a sense of direction, empathy as a sense of ethics, sexuality as a sense of animality, culture as a sense of time and art as a sense of ambiguity.
Through the project, Feder makes an argument about the importance of these senses and the ways in which new technologies are reshaping them through close readings of literature, art, popular culture and science. Feder’s research will involve public engagement with art and the environmental humanities during her residency at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.
“The kind of knowledge we create in the humanities requires time to think, read and write. This time requires support, either from universities or external grants,” she said. “I feel particularly fortunate to be in residence at the NCMA during the fellowship year, participating in the life of the museum and writing about several pieces in their permanent collection.”
Each of the 2019 fellows receives a stipend of $75,000 plus $6,000 for research and project costs, as well as additional funding in the year following the fellowship for programming at their member institution that promotes the public value of humanities scholarship.
To learn more about the Mellon/ACLS Fellows, visit https://www.acls.org/Recent-Awardees/Mellon/ACLS-Scholars-Society or contact fellowships@acls.org.
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Contact: Dr. Helena Feder, director, ECU Great Books Program, associate professor of literature and environment,federh@ecu.edu, 252-328-6678