Recipients of the four annually awarded Internal Faculty Fellowships receive a one-course teaching release in the spring semester of the fellowship year, a $1,000 research bursary, and an office in the Glasscock Center for the fellowship year. For recipients with more than a one-course teaching load, an additional teaching release will be arranged by the recipient's home department or program.

The 2009-2010 fellows will be resident in the Glasscock Center in the spring of 2010, pursuing scholarly projects under the theme "Journeys." This theme will allow explorations of everything from space exploration to border crossings, quest myths to cinematic travelogues, farewell rituals to forced marches, dioramas to guide books and travel diaries – and much else besides.

David McWhirter, Associate Professor in Department of English, is working on a book-length study of Eudora Welty (1909-2001). “‘Part of Some Larger Continuity’: Welty’s Journeys,” examines the multiple narrative, discursive, and symbolic functions of travel in Welty’s fiction (1909-2001). This proposed chapter explores how representations of travel function in Welty’s texts as alternative discourses of women’s history and desire, as sites for rethinking the meaning of “home,” and as opportunities to reconceptualize long-standard approaches to “the south”  and to regionalism more generally.

Nancy Plankey Videla, Assistant Professor in Department of Sociology, pursues the question “Can there be a feminist ethnography?”  in her project “Learning from the Past, Looking towards the Future: Feminist Ethnography and the Issue of Consent .” She contemplates her time spent in a garment firm in Mexico and explores questions such as  what does consent mean in shifting relational contexts; can ethnography be ethical and/or feminist; and can critical ethnography become politically engaged in support of disadvantaged groups?

Neha Vora, Assistant Professor in Department of Anthropology, explores the negotiations and challenges that accompany the journeys of American universities into the Gulf Arab States, a trend that has taken off in the past few years. She is investigating forms of identification and citizenship—local, global, religious, and gendered—that emerge in the classrooms of these universities, and the unique dialogues developed by students and faculty members engaged in the “Arab/American university” experience.

Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Assistant Professor in Department of History, will be continuing work on France at the Edges: Life in France’s Atlantic Port Cities, 1760-1830, a project that explores connections among the French Caribbean (including French Guiana), French North America, continental France, and French West Africa during the so-called Age of Empire. She focuses on shifts in administrative personnel, in volume of trade, and in port demographics around the Atlantic rim (Saint Pierre, Martinique; New Orleans, Louisiana; Cayenne, French Guiana; Bordeaux, France, and Saint-Louis/Gorée, Senegal).