Awards bring two faculty members new opportunities

Faculty members Darren Dochuk, PhD, and Nancy Reynolds, PhD, will be delving into new experiences thanks to awards received this spring.

Dochuk

Dochuk, an associate professor of history and a faculty member of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics, will be in China for two weeks in June. He received a 2014 China Residency to teach a weeklong seminar on the history of U.S. religion at the American Studies Center at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

About 35 participants — including professors, master’s students and doctoral candidates — will be enrolled in the seminar. These participants were chosen from a large pool of applicants from more than 20 major Chinese universities.

Dochuk said his goal is to teach them the broad scope of U.S. religious history in ways that equip them for their own research and teaching of American history.

Three U.S. scholars will participate in this year’s seminars in China. As part of the exchange program, three Chinese scholars will do research in the United States at select universities. The Organization of American Historians and the American History Research Association of China sponsor the seminars and residency. The Ford Foundation funds the residency.

For more information on the program, visit the organization’s site.

Reynolds


Reynolds
received a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for her project, “Heat: Recent Egyptian Histories.” She is an associate professor of history; of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern languages and cultures; and of women, gender and sexuality studies.

New Directions Fellowships help faculty members in the humanities acquire systematic training outside of their own areas of interest. The fellowship will allow Reynolds to pursue formal training in environmental studies, as well as botany, zoology and geology, to undertake future research on the environmental history of Egypt.

New Directions Fellows receive the equivalent of one academic year’s salary, two summers of additional support, and tuition or course fees associated with the fellow’s training programs.

For more information on the New Directions Fellowship, visit the Mellon Foundation site.