Tulane doctoral candidates awarded Newcombe dissertation fellowships

Two PhD candidates in the Tulane School of Liberal Arts, Alix Riviere and Emily Wright, were awarded with Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Riviere’s project is “Bittersweet Childhoods: Enslaved Youth in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana and Martinique,” which explores the diverse experiences of enslaved children at a time when ideas about children and their needs were changing and abolitionism was on the rise; and Wright’s project is “The Female Apostles of the South: Protestant Women’s Religious Activism in the Antebellum Gulf South,” which examines the public religious lives of free and enslaved Protestant women in the antebellum Gulf South. Both fellows are graduate students in the history department.

Founded in 1945, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation identifies and develops the nation’s best minds to meet its most critical challenges. The foundation supports its fellows as the next generation of leaders shaping American society.

This year’s Newcombe Fellows represent 15 institutions from across the nation. Their fields of study include anthropology, English, ethnomusicology, geography, health policy and management, history, philosophy, political science, religious studies and sociology.

The Newcombe Fellowship fosters the original and significant study of ethical or religious values in all fields of the humanities and social sciences. Each 2018 fellow will receive a 12-month award of $25,000 to support the final year of dissertation work.

The Newcombe Fellowship is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. Funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the fellowship was created in 1981 and has supported more than 1,200 doctoral candidates, most of them now noted faculty at domestic and foreign institutions.