The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the Center’s earliest supporters, established two fellowships upon the opening of the National Humanities Center in 1978. The Rockefeller Foundation is a private American foundation based in New York City. Established in 1913 by Standard Oil cofounder John D. Rockefeller, with his son John D. Rockefeller Jr., and business and philanthropic advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation’s mission is to promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world.
| 1978–1979 | Richard Dorson | Indiana University | The Other America in Legend |
| 1978–1979 | Perez Zagorin | University of Rochester | A Comparative Study of Revolution in Early Modern Europe |
| 1978–1979 | Elizabeth F. Flower | University of Pennsylvania | The Practical as a Philosophical Conception and Its Bases in American Thought |
| 1978–1979 | A. Hunter Dupree | Brown University | The Role of Measurement in History |
| 1978–1979 | Ann Douglas | Columbia University | Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and the Literary Life of New York in the 1920s |
| 1978–1979 | Carl Nordenfalk | Nationalmuseum, Stockholm | Rembrandt’s “The Oath of the Batavians” |
| 1978–1979 | Jacob Talmon | Hebrew University of Jerusalem | The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century |
| 1978–1979 | William E. Leuchtenburg | Columbia University | FDR and the Supreme Court Crisis of the 1930s |
| 1979–1980 | Stephen Pyne | U.S. Forest Service | The Culture of Fire |
| 1979–1980 | Cynthia E. Russett | Yale University | Scientific Attempts to Define Gender Differences in England and America, 1860–1920 |
| 1979–1980 | Yehoshua Arieli | Hebrew University of Jerusalem | History and Politics |
| 1979–1980 | Chaim Perelman | University of Brussels, Belgium | The Logic of Legal Reasoning |
| 1979–1980 | Paul Ricoeur | University of Chicago | The Narrative Function and the Human Experience of Time |
| 1980–1981 | James Olney | North Carolina Central University | Autobiography and Cultural Anthropology |
| 1980–1981 | Ralph Elliott | Australian National University | Thomas Hardy’s English: A Critical and Stylistic Analysis of the Language of His Poetry and Prose |
| 1980–1981 | Allen Ballard | City College of New York | The Emergence of the Black Middle Class—the Case of Philadelphia |
| 1980–1981 | Thomas R. Cripps | Morgan State University | A Social History of Blacks in American Film, 1942 to the Present |
| 1980–1981 | Sylvia Wynter | Stanford University | Uncle Tom Revisited—The Stock Characterization of the Negro in Western Literature |
| 1980–1981 | David Wills | Amherst College | Documentary History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1816–1916, and Afro-American Religious Thought |
| 1981–1982 | Harvey Gross | State University of NY, Stony Brook | The First Moment of the Modern: 1900–1914 |
| 1981–1982 | Alvin I. Goldman | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Epistemology and Cognitive Systems |
| 1981–1982 | Kejia Yuan | Chinese Academy of Social Sciences | A Study of Western Modernist Literature |
| 1982–1983 | R. Douglas Porch | Unviersity College of Wales | The French Colonial Army, 1830–1962 |
| 1982–1983 | Richard Bjornson | Ohio State University | Literature and National Identity in Cameroon |
| 1982–1983 | Houston Baker | University of Pennsylvania | Afro-American Narrative and the Anthropology of Art |
| 1982–1983 | Carl Wellman | Washington University in St. Louis | A General Theory of Rights |
| 1982–1983 | Harmon Smith | Duke University | The Development of Autonomous Moral Authority in American Christianity |
| 1982–1983 | Norman Sherry | University of Lancaster, United Kingdom | The Life and Work of Graham Greene |
| 1983–1984 | Lance Bertelsen | University of Texas at Austin | John Wilkes and the Popular Media |
| 1983–1984 | Martin Meisel | Columbia University | The Imagination of Chaos in Western Literature and Thought |
| 1983–1984 | David Levering Lewis | University of California, San Diego | Race to Fashoda: Ethiopia, Africa, and the Upper Nile, 1896–1899 |
| 1983–1984 | Igal Kvart | Hebrew University of Jerusalem | Reference and Knowledge |
| 1983–1984 | Nayantara Shgal | Unaffiliated | A Man-Size Cloud (a novel) |
| 1986–1987 | Lee Mitchell | Princeton University | Determined Fictions: The Excluded Self in American Literary Naturalism |
| 1986–1987 | Darlene Clark Hine | Purdue University | Black Women in White: A History of Black Women in the Nursing Profession, 1886–1950 |
| 1987–1988 | Helen Ullrich | Independent Scholar | Cultural Study of Illness: A South India Perspective on Depression |
| 1987–1988 | Debora Shuger | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Hooker: A Study in Late Renaissance Thought |
| 1987–1988 | William James Booth | Duke University | Masters and Servants: Reflections on Marxism and Its Origins |
| 1988–1989 | Sarah Jane Deutsch | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Women of Boston: Gender and the City, 1870–1950 |
| 1988–1989 | Ewa Kuryluk | Independent Scholar | Veronica and Her Cloth: Origins, Tradition, and Symbolism of a “True” Icon |
| 1989–1990 | Harriet Guest | University College, London | Experienced Women: Religion and Femininity in 18th-Century Women’s Writing |
| 1989–1990 | Angelika Bammer | Emory University | Mother Tongues and Other Strangers: Discourses of Foreignness in Twentieth-Century Literature |
| 1990–1991 | Leon R. Fink | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | America’s “Missing” Social Democrats: Labor Intellectuals in the Progressive Era, 1890–1916 |
| 1990–1991 | Anna K. Clark | University of North Carolina, Charlotte | Gender and the Making of the English Working Class |
| 1991–1992 | David L. Smith | Williams College | Racial Writing, Black and White |
| 1991–1992 | Eve K. Sedgwick | Duke University | Marriage Inside Out: Across Genders, Across Sexualities |
| 1992–1993 | Marianne Hirsch | Dartmouth College | Family Pictures: Photography and Narratives of Loss |
| 1992–1993 | Katherine T. Bartlett | Duke University | Negotiating Tradition in Law: An Historicist Approach |
| 1993–1994 | Shepard Krech III | Brown University | The North American Indian: Ecologist, Conservationist, and Environmentalist? |
| 1993–1994 | Janet J. Ewald | Duke University | Crossing the Red Sea: Transport, Slavery, and Free Labor, 1800–1910 |
| 1994–1995 | Toril Moi | Duke University | Materialist Feminism: New Perspectives on Feminist Theory |
| 1994–1995 | Charles Capper | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | Margaret Fuller: The Public Years |
| 1995–1996 | John David French | Duke University | The Metalworkers of ABC: Working Class Consciousness, Organization, and Ideology |
| 1995–1996 | Mario Klarer | University of Innsbruck, Austria | Ekphrasis: Pictorial Description and Textual Self-Reflexivity in English and American Literature |
| 1996–1997 | George A. Chauncey | University of Chicago | American Culture and the Making of the Modern Gay World, 1935–1975 |
| 1996–1997 | Penny Von Eschen | University of Iowa | ‘Satchmo Blows Up the World’: Jazz, Race and Empire in the Age of the Cold War |
| 1997–1998 | Susannah Heschel | Case Western Reserve University | When Jesus Was Aryan: Protestant Theologians in Nazi Germany |
| 1997–1998 | Karen Barkey | Columbia University | Divergent Paths to Nationhood in the Early Twentieth Century |
| 1998–1999 | Ashraf H. A. Rushdy | Wesleyan University | The Play of Race: Meditations on an American Institution |
| 1998–1999 | Mary Gluck | Brown University | The Aesthetics of “Low” Modernism: Typologies of the Avant-Garde Artist in Paris |
| 1999–2000 | Jerry Ward | Tougaloo College | Delta Narratives: Memory, Testimony, and Social Change (joint project with Dr. Kim Rogers) |
| 1999–2000 | Kim Lacy Rogers | Dickinson College | Delta Narratives: Memory, Testimony, and Social Change (joint project with Dr. Jerry Ward) |
| 2000–2001 | Kenneth Janken | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | Mr. N Double-A C P: The Life of Walter White, 1893–1955 |
| 2000–2001 | Haile M. Larebo | Morehouse College | Church, State and Society in Ethiopia, 1885–1995 |
| 2001–2002 | Winifred Breines | Northeastern University | The Trouble Between Us: White Women, Black Women, The Movement Years |
| 2001–2002 | Bettye Collier-Thomas | Temple University | “She Hath Done What She Could”: African American Women & Religion |
| 2002–2003 | Ginger S. Frost | Samford University | ”As Husband and Wife”: Cohabitation in Nineteenth-Century England |
| 2002–2003 | Faith Lois Smirh | Brandeis University | Making Modern Subjects: Cultural and Intellectual Formation, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, 1880–1910 |
| 2003–2004 | P. Gabrielle Foreman | Occidental College | Reading Miscegenation and Homoerotics in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Slavery Literature and Culture |
| 2003–2004 | Elizabeth L. Kennedy | University of Arizona | Many Strands, One Woman: Lesbianism, Marriage, and Sexuality in an Upper-Class Life |
| 2004–2005 | Peter H. Sigal | California State University, Los Angeles | The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality in Early Nahua Culture and Society |
| 2004–2005 | Phyllis W. Hunter | University of North Carolina, Greensboro | Geographies of Capitalism: Imagining Asia in Early America |
| 2005–2006 | Lochlann Jain | Stanford University | Commodity Violence: American Automobility |
| 2005–2006 | Kyeong-Hee Choi | University of Chicago | Rewritten in Divided Korea: Colonial Literature as a History, 1945–1960 |
| 2006–2007 | Francesca M. Bordogna | Northwestern University | Traveling Philosophers: The Constitution of an International Pragmatist Network, 1890–1920 |
| 2006–2007 | Randal M. Jelks | Calvin College | Benjamin Elijah Mays, a Religious Rebel in the Jim Crow South: An Intellectual Biography |
| 2007–2008 | Kate Flint | Rutgers University | Writing and Photography |
| 2007–2008 | Laura F. Edwards | Duke University | The People and Their Peace: The Re-Constitution of Governance in the American South, 1787–1840 |
| 2008–2009 | Steven Lee Rubenstein | University of Liverpool, United Kingdom | Shuar Women as Agents of Political Discourse and Practice |
| 2008–2009 | Joao Jose Reis | Federal University of Bahia, Brazil | Ganhadores: Street Labor in Nineteenth-Century Bahia, Brazil |
| 2009–2010 | Ana Mariella Bacigalupo | State University of NY, Buffalo | Shamanic Memory and Historical Consciousness: The Making of Francisca Colipe and Her Mapuche Community in Chile |
| 2009–2010 | Ellen Frances Stroud | Bryn Mawr College | Dead As Dirt: An Environmental History of the Dead Body |
| 2010–2011 | Paul Berliner | Duke University | Biographies of Mbira Maestro Magaya and Jazz Prodigy Booker Little |
| 2010–2011 | Miguel Tamen | University of Lisbon, Portugal | The Alice Books: An Introduction to Literature and the Arts |
| 2011–2012 | Sandye Hewamanne | Wake Forest University | Sri Lanka’s Former Global Factory Workers Negotiating New Lives |
| 2011–2012 | Ellen Ross | Ramapo College of New Jersey | Missionaries, Philanthropists and “Valiant Warrior Queens”: From Social Work to Social Activism in Britain, 1914–1950 |
| 2012–2013 | Jairo Moreno | University of Pennsylvania | Syncopated Modernities: Musical Latin-Americanisms in the U.S., 1978–2008 |
| 2012–2013 | Linda Rupert | University of North Carolina, Greensboro | Inter-Colonial Marronage, Colonial Policy, and Imperial Jurisdiction in the Early Modern Caribbean |
| 2013–2014 | Julie Greene | University of Maryland | The Wages of Empire: Labor, Race, and U.S. Expansionism, 1865 to 1920 |
| 2013–2014 | Stephen J. Shoemaker | University of Oregon | The Apocryphal Mary: The Hidden History of Early Christian Devotion to the Mother of Jesus |
| 2014–2015 | Barbara Boyd | Bowdoin College | Ovid’s Homer: Tradition, Authority, and Epic Reception |
| 2014–2015 | Mark Hansen | Duke University | Feed Forward: On the “Future” of 21st Century Media |
| 2015–2016 | Owen Flanagan | Duke University | The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibilities |
| 2015–2016 | Bill Schwarz | Queen Mary, University of London | (1) The Politics of the Cultural Turn (2) Politics and Culture in the Age of Neoliberalism |
| 2016–2017 | Nicholas Harkness | Harvard University | A Semiotics of Intensity: Glossolalia, Collective Prayer, and South Korean Social Life |
| 2016–2017 | Phillip Horky | Durham University, United Kingdom | Pythagorean Philosophy: 250 BCE to 200 CE |
| 2017–2018 | Peter Galison | Harvard University | Contested Visibilities and the Anthropogenic Image |
| 2017–2018 | John McGowan | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | Comedy/Comity: Resources for Civility |
| 2018–2019 | Mia Fuller | University of California, Berkeley | Mussolini Threshing Still: Inertia Memoriae, Italy, and Fascist Monuments |
| 2018–2019 | Rebecca Goetz | New York University | Captive Archipelagos: Native Enslavement in the Greater Caribbean, 1492–1792 |
| 2019–2020 | Michele Lamprakos | University of Maryland | Memento Mauri: The After Life of the Great Mosque of Córdoba |
| 2019–2020 | Martha Rust | New York University | Item: Lists and the Poetics of Reckoning in Late Medieval England |
| 2020–2021 | Bryna Goodman | University of Oregon | Finance and Fortune: Economics, Calculation, and the Fate of the Chinese Republic |
| 2020–2021 | Adriane Lentz-Smith | Duke University | The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights |
| 2021–2022 | Barbara Kowalzig | New York University | Gods around the Pond: Religion, Society and the Sea in the Early Mediterranean Economy |
| 2021–2022 | Brenna M. Munro | University of Miami | Queer Writing in Digital Times: The Mobile Nigerian Present |
| 2022–2023 | Tiffany Willoughby-Herard | University of California, Irvine | “I Meant for You to be Free”: Winnie Mandela’s Love Letter to and Pedagogies for Young South Africans, the Post-1994 Generation |
| 2023–2024 | E.K. Tan | Stony Brook University | Queer Homecoming: Translocal Remapping of Sinophone Kinship |
| 2024–2025 | Mark Cruse | Arizona State University | From Alexander the Great to Tamerlane: World Dominion in the Medieval French Imagination |