The Robert D. Newman Fellowship, formerly known as the Trustees’ Fellowship, was endowed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and has been awarded annually since 2017. The fellowship honors Robert D. Newman, president and director of the National Humanities Center from 2015 to 2024, who broadened the Center’s reach, enhanced its programs for scholars and educators, and vigorously championed the humanities for nearly a decade. This fellowship is one of several at the NHC created with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
| 2017–2018 | Rian Thum | Loyola University New Orleans | Islamic China |
| 2018–2019 | Andrea Brady | Queen Mary University of London | Poetry and Bondage: A New History of Lyric |
| 2019–2020 | Jill Bender | University of North Carolina at Greensboro | Assisted Emigrants: Irish Female Migration Projects and the British Empire |
| 2020–2021 | Gregg Mitman | University of Wisconsin–Madison | Bloodborne: Invasion and the Politics of Disease |
| 2021–2022 | Ana Paula Höfling | University of North Carolina at Greensboro | Dancing Brazil’s Other: Choreographies of Race, Class, and Nation |
| 2022–2023 | Martha M. F. Kelly | University of Missouri | How to be a Russian Icon: The Post-Soviet Public Life of Poet Olga Sedakova |
| 2023–2024 | Sean L. Field | The University of Vermont | Women Writing Saints’ Lives: Gendered Authority and Female Authorship in the Middle Ages |
| 2024–2025 | Sonia Hazard | Florida State University | Christianity and the Book in the Cherokee Diaspora, 1821–1861 |