Birkelund Senior Fellowship

The Birkelund Fellowship was endowed by John P. Birkelund, an investment executive and former director of the New York Stock Exchange. It has been awarded annually since 1999 to exceptional scholars from many disciplines, including historians, literary theorists, and philosophers.

While chairman of the board of trustees of the National Humanities Center from 1996–2004, Birkelund’s leadership propelled the success of the Center’s first major capital campaign, raising over $22 million and providing sixteen endowed fellowships for scholars in three years. Birkelund’s work as a trustee of other educational institutions focused on education and the interplay of history, diplomacy, policy and culture. He was, himself, an accomplished historian and wrote a biography of Gustav Stresemann, Chancellor and Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic. Birkelund’s continued dedication to the academic community was recognized when he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Science.

1999–2000	Robert D. Richardson, Jr.	Wesleyan University	An Intellectual Biography of William James
2000–2001	Thomas W. Laqueur	University of California, Berkeley	Death, Memory, and Modernity
2001–2002	Thomas A. Brady	University of California, Berkeley	German Histories in the Age of Reform
2002–2003	Bernard M.J. Wasserstein	University of Glasgow	Krakowiec: Jews and Their Neighbors in a Small Town in Eastern Galicia, 1772–1946
2003–2004	Randolph Starn	University of California, Berkeley	Authenticating the Past: Archives, Museums, Libraries
2004–2005	Roger Chickering	Georgetown University	Total War in a Lovely Place: A Cultural History of Freiburg, 1914–1918
2005–2006	Martin Jay	University of California, Berkeley	The Ambivalent Virtues of Mendacity: Lying in Politics
2006–2007	Christopher Browning	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Remembering Survival: The Factory Slave Camps of Starachowice, Poland
2007–2008	Nigel Smith	Princeton University	The State and Literary Production, c. 1500–c.1700
2008–2009	Thomas L. Haskell	Rice University	Sensibility and Moral Capital in Abolishing the Slave Trade
2009–2010	Kit Fine	New York University	Metaphysics of Material Things
2010–2011	Dane Kennedy	George Washington University	Mapping Continents: British Exploration of Africa and Australia
2011–2012	Martin J. Weiner	Rice University	Liberalism and the British Empire
2012–2013	Stefan Collini	University of Cambridge	Nostalgic Imagination: Literary Criticism in English Culture
2013–2014	Harvey J. Graff	Ohio State University	Undiciplining Knowledge: Pursuing the Dream of Interdisciplarity in the Twentieth Century, A Social History
2014	William Newman	Indiana University, Bloomington	The Alchemy of Isaac Newton—A New Appraisal
2015	Derek Attridge	University of York	Poetry in Performance from Home to the Renaissance: The Middle Ages
2015–2016	Nancy Cott	Harvard University	World-Venturing: Cosmopolitan Self-Invention after the Great War
2016–2017	Annabel Wharton	Duke University	Manipulating Models: Diagnostic, Phenomenal, Architectural
2017–2018	Tera Hunter	Princeton University	The African American Marriage Gap in the Twentieth Century
2018–2019	Matthew Rubery	Queen Mary University of London	Reader’s Block: Testimonies of Neurological Reading Disorders
2019–2020	Giuseppe Gerbino	Columbia University	Music and Mind in the Renaissance
2020–2021	Jordynn Jack	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Training the Brain: Rhetoric, Neuropolicy, and Education
2021–2022	Lorraine Daston	University of Chicago	Science Goes Global
2022–2023	Brian Lewis	McGill University	Greek to the Soul: George Ives and Homosexuality from Wilde to Wolfenden
2023–2024	Oleg Budnitskii	HSE University, Moscow	“The Red Army is Not Ideal”: Soviet Soldiers’ Violence Against Civilians, 1939–1947
2024–2025	Julia A. King	St. Mary’s College of Maryland	Land as Archive: An Indigenous Landscape History of the Rappahannock People of Tidewater Virginia