Established to honor businessman and philanthropist Frank Hawkins Kenan, the Kenan fellowship has been awarded annually to a humanities scholar since 1995. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1935, Kenan bought a Durham-based oil distributor and established the Tops Petroleum service stations, which transitioned into Kenan Transport. Kenan was also one of the original directors of the Research Triangle Park, which was conceived to attract and retain research-based industries that would hire graduates of the area universities.
As a trustee of the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust, Kenan was committed to fueling local economic development and advancing higher education and the arts through his generous philanthropy, which led him to endow the fellowship at the Center prior to his death. Further, he established a separate fund to establish a research and teaching program focused on private enterprise. This later became the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC’s business school, which later became the Kenan-Flagler Business School.
| 1995–1996 | Robert O. Keohane | Harvard University | Contested Commitments in United States Foreign Policy |
| 1997–1998 | Daniel W. Patterson | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Cultural Interpretation of 19th-Century Scotch-Irish Gravestones in the Carolina Piedmont |
| 1998–1999 | Jonathan A. Bush | Santa Clara University | The American Nuremberg Trials, 1946–1949 |
| 1999–2000 | Thomas Christiano | University of Arizona | Philosophical Foundations of Democracy |
| 2000–2001 | Paul Weithman | University of Notre Dame | Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship |
| 2001–2002 | Bernard Gert | Dartmouth College | Hobbes and Human Nature |
| 2002–2003 | Paul Griffiths | Iowa State University | Petty Crime, Policing, and Punishment in London, 1545–1660 |
| 2003–2004 | Lewis Erenberg | Loyola University Chicago | Louis v. Schmeling: Boxing, Race, and Nationalism, 1930s–1950s |
| 2004–2005 | Tony Day | Independent scholar | Forms of Reality: Literature in Java, 1800–2000 |
| 2005–2006 | Cynthia Herrup | University of Southern California | “When Mercy Seasons Justice”: Pardons and the Constitution in Early Modern England |
| 2006–2007 | Jann Pasler | University of California, San Diego | Music, Race, and Colonialism in Fin-de-siècle France |
| 2007–2008 | Paul Werth | University of Nevada, Las Vegas | Arbiters of the Sacred: Religious Toleration and the Civil Order in Imperial Russia |
| 2008–2009 | Michael G. Wood | Princeton University | Proust’s Affair: Fantasies and Fictions of the Dreyfus Case |
| 2009–2010 | Bart Ehrman | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Literary Forgery and Counter-Forgery in the Early Christian Tradition |
| 2010–2011 | Behnam Sadeghi | Stanford University | Women in the Public Space: Evolution of Ideas in the First 150 Years of Islam |
| 2011–2012 | Laurie Paul | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | A Common Cause: A Unified Account of Causation and Causal Reasoning |
| 2012–2013 | Andrew Cayton | Miami University | Imperial America: 1672–1764 |
| 2013–2014 | Jocelyn Olcott | Duke University | “The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History”: The 1975 International Women’s Year Conference and the Challenges of Transnational Feminism |
| 2014–2015 | Noah Heringman | University of Missouri, Columbia | Deep Time and the Prehistoric Turn |
| 2015–2016 | Mark Possanza | University of Pittsburgh | Fragmentary Republican Latin, vo. VIII, “Lyric, Elegiac and Hexameter Poetry” |
| 2016–2017 | Sebastián P. Carassai | University of Buenos Aires | Eclipsed Histories: The Sixties and Seventies in Argentina from a Microhistorical Perpective |
| 2017–2018 | Elizabeth Otto | University at Buffalo, State University of New York | Haunted Bauhaus |
| 2018–2019 | Franziska Seraphim | Boston College | Geographics of Justice: Japan, Germany, and the Allied War Crimes Program |
| 2019–2020 | Chérie Ndaliko | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Archival Mutations: Decomposing Aesthetics of Atrocity in Congo |
| 2020–2021 | Emily Baragwanath | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Xenophon’s Women |
| 2021–2022 | Kelly S. McDonough | The University of Texas at Austin | Indigenous Science and Technologies: Nahuas and the World around Them |
| 2022–2023 | Molly Todd | Montana State University | Pictures of Conscience: Central American Refugees and International Human Rights Campaigns, 1979–2019 |
| 2023–2024 | Tom Johnson | University of York | The Reckoners: Economic Life in a Fifteenth-Century Fishing Village |
| 2024–2025 | John Wood Sweet | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | The Captive’s Tale: Venture Smith and the African Roots of the American Republic |