For the 2021-2022 academic year, the National Humanities Center (NHC) announced the appointment of 36 fellows. Chosen from 638 applicants, Jessica Hurley, from Mason's Department of English, will serve as a Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Fellow. These leading scholars will come to the center from universities and colleges in 16 U.S. states as well as from Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Taiwan. Through its residential fellowship program, the center provides scholars with the resources necessary to generate new knowledge and to further understanding of all forms of cultural expression, social interaction, and human thought.
Jessica Hurley’s research focuses on the American nuclear complex as an infrastructural phenomenon that has shaped the development of both material environments and literary archives in the United States and across the globe. Her first book, Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in fall 2020. The fellowship will support her second book, Nuclear Decolonizations, which expands her research to the global scale. Hurley will explore how nuclearization has impacted the understandings of decolonization in India, South Africa, Oceania, and Native North America, and how writers and activists in the Global South have both represented the imperial violence of the nuclear complex and used fiction, poetry, film, and performance to theorize alternatives to it.
The NHC is a private, nonprofit organization, and the only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in all areas of the humanities. The center is devoted to advancing significant humanistic study and reflection and to making those insights available both inside and outside the academic world.
Interested in applying for the 2022-2023 fellowship? The center’s applications for the 2022-23 academic year have a deadline of October 7, 2021. Details about NHC fellowships, including application instructions, are available here.
August 10, 2021