The Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies has awarded eleven fellowships for 2022-23. Recipients will join faculty and graduate students from History and other departments for a series of lectures, workshops, and symposia.

This includes the newly reinstituted Residency Research Fellowship, which supports historical research in the Ann Arbor area by scholars outside UM-Ann Arbor. Alice Chapman, professor of history at Grand Valley State University, will hold this position in 2022-23. Learn more about the research plans of Professor Chapman and other Eisenberg fellows below. 

These fellows join more than 200 others who have earned Eisenberg fellowships since the institute’s inception in 2006. The institute announces its annual fellowship program in December and issues the awards in spring. The faculty and graduate student award terms are July 1 to June 30; the postdoctoral award term is September 1 to August 31. These awards have been made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.

2022-23 Faculty Fellowships

  • Kathryn Babayan
    Professor; History, Middle East Studies; University of Michigan

Professor Babayan plans to develop the Isfahan Anthology Project and learn about the available technologies to design the digital infrastructure for the transcription of a searchable manuscript archive of seventeenth-century anthologies. She anticipates that the EIHS intellectual community will be a generative place to prepare grant applications for the digital humanities to broaden the scope of cataloging and annotating anthologies.

During the 2022-2023 academic year, Professor de Pee will be writing a trade book about China in the eleventh century, entitled The Chinese Renaissance: How the Song Dynasty Changed China and the World in the Eleventh Century.

2022-23 Residency Research Fellowship

  • Alice Chapman
    Professor, History, Grand Valley State University

During her fellowship at the Eisenberg Institute, Professor Chapman will write several chapters of her book, Christ the Physician: Healing Spiritual Sickness in the 12th and 13th Centuries. Her work focuses on the image of Christ the Physician (Christus medicus) in the Latin texts of twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and is significant because it brings together images, metaphors, and analogies elucidating definitions of spiritual health in the Middle Ages.

2022-23 Postdoctoral Fellowship

As a postdoctoral fellow, Hayley R. Bowman will develop her dissertation into a book manuscript. She also plans to complete two articles: one focused on female mystical sensory engagement and another exploring the role of angels in Sor María’s accounts, placing them into the wider theological context of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

2022-23 Graduate Student Research Fellowships

Drawing on archival materials in U-M’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection and the Walter P. Reuther Library, Richard A. Bachmann will investigate how members of the Correspondence Publishing Committee—a multiracial group of Detroit workers and labor activists—and industrial psychologists and sociologists from Michigan made sense of automation in Detroit and beyond.

  • Alex Burnett
    PhD Student, History and Women’s & Gender Studies, University of Michigan

As an Eisenberg Institute fellow, Alex Burnett will study transgender history in 1970s New York City. Using archival collections from the New York Public Library, she will analyze how trans women and transfeminine people navigated criminalized work, unemployment, and workplace harassment.

As an Eisenberg fellow, Bethany Donovan will be drafting the initial chapters of her dissertation on fraudulent goods and false objects in late-medieval London. She will be specifically working on chapters dealing with craft guild regulations and the contentious boundary between the categories of “old” and “new.” 

  • Bryan Goh
    PhD Student, History, University of Michigan

During his fellowship, Bryan Goh hopes to develop his graduate seminar paper into a publishable product. He hopes to explore concepts regarding perceptions, projections, and propagations of Christianity from the missionary’s perspective, and understand how racialized imaginaries affected the proselytization process in Southeast Asia.

During the fellowship period, Sikandar Kumar will finish writing the last chapter of his dissertation which examines the vernacularisation of communist and socialist politics in north India in the early twentieth century. He will then proceed to rework the earlier chapters of his dissertation. 

During the fellowship period, Catherine Schenck plans to continue her dissertation work. She will draft chapters on the specific rituals associated with curing lovesickness and how ritual authority is constructed and wielded.

2022-23 Graduate Student Liaison

  • Robert Diaz
    PhD Student, History, University of Michigan

Framing his research around a selection of over 100 essays written by Filipino/a youths between 1901 and 1905, Robert Diaz will explore the early years of the American colonial project, when these youths witnessed the violent transformation from Spanish rule to American rule, and Filipino nationalist struggles for independence.