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 2008-2009 fellows will be resident in the Glasscock Center in the spring of 2009, 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.

Leah DeVun, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, will focus on understandings of intersex from the 12th-15th centuries, a critical period for the formation of ideas about intersex as well as the establishment of professionalized fields such as medicine, surgery, and law. By drawing upon interdisciplinary scholarship and previously unpublished medieval texts, her study offers a new perspective on the cultural history of sex and examines how categories of biological sex have been mediated by cultural concerns in the past.

April Lee Hatfield, Associate Professor in the Department of History, will scrutinize the different cultural, legal, and political meanings of the spaces (sea and land) separating Spanish and English settlements in the western Caribbean and southeastern North America between 1584 and 1748. She will study how legal and geographic distinctions made the mainland and Caribbean borders function differently and shaped the experiences of those who moved between empires and the relations between empires.

Claire Katz, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Women's Studies Program, will examine the dominant Platonic model of education that governs the history of Western philosophy and problematize its underlying message as paradoxical. While arguing that the influential models of contemporary "civic" education reinscribe the Platonic view of education, she will contend that a more promising alternative to the modern subject and the acquisition of knowledge is found within the Jewish philosophy of education.