Three Trinity Faculty Receive 2024-2025 National Humanities Center Fellowships

Three Trinity faculty have been named National Humanities Center (NHC) Fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Sarah M. Quesada and Joseph Winters will join 28 other scholars, chosen from a field of 492 applicants, to make up the 47th class of resident fellows since the National Humanities Center’s opening in 1978. The three Duke professors will engage in research and writing on individual projects while participating in lectures, seminars and conferences.

“I’m really looking forward to working among the cohort of scholars at the Center,” said Annette Joseph-Gabriel, John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies.

Joseph-Gabriel will use her fellowship to write her book, “Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World,” about the experiences of enslaved children during the 18th and 19th centuries. She has also received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project, which is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Sarah M. Quesada, associate professor (formerly Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor) of Romance Studies and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, is the author of “The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature” (Cambridge Studies in World Literature, 2022). “During my fellowship year, I’m excited to begin work on a second book project based on extensive archival research,” she said.

Quesada’s NHC project, “The Untold South-South: Greater Mexico, African Decolonization and a Latin-African Solidarity (1956-2008)” will examine the multilingual exchange of ideas that took place between writers in Africa and Latin America, as well as Latinx writers in the U.S., to create a literature in support of African decolonization during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

Being selected for the NHC fellowship is “an exceptional honor,” Quesada said. “I am also grateful because the fellowship reflects great excitement for my project by colleagues in diverse fields.”

Joseph Winters, Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African & African American Studies, expressed his appreciation for “the opportunity to participate in such an illustrious space with world-renowned thinkers.” He plans to use this time to research and start writing his next book project, “Beyond Imperial Piety: Black Study, the Opaque Sacred and World De-formation.”

Winters has written extensively about Black studies and Black religion. His new project argues that “Black studies, often assumed to be a secular field, provides a robust criticism of the religious grammars that have shaped and sanctioned Western imperialism, coloniality and anti-Blackness.” The project will examine the ways that authors and thinkers within Black studies “provide conceptions of the sacred, spirit and secularity that accentuate the opaque and unruly features of the world.”

About the cohort of 2024-2025 Fellows, Robert D. Newman, president and director of the National Humanities Center, said, “We are extremely pleased to be able to support the exciting work of these exceptional scholars. They were selected from a highly competitive group of applicants representing institutions from across the globe. We look forward to their arrival in the fall as they each contribute their individual brilliance to creating a lively intellectual community.”