Established by The Duke Endowment in 1999, the fellowship is awarded annually to a humanities scholar from Davidson College, Duke University, Furman University, or Johnson C. Smith University.
Since 1924 the Duke Endowment has worked to help people and strengthen communities in North Carolina and South Carolina by nurturing children, promoting health, educating minds, and enriching spirits. Located in Charlotte, NC, the Endowment seeks to fulfill the vision and legacy of James Buchanan Duke, one of the great industrialists and philanthropists of the twentieth century.
| 2000–2001 | Michael Valdez Moses | Duke University | Nation of the Dead: The Politics of Irish Writing, 1890–1990 |
| 2001–2002 | Orin Starn | Duke University | Ishi’s Brain: Anthropologists, Native Americans, and the Life and Death of the Last Yahi Indian |
| 2002–2003 | Gail Gibson | Davidson College | Childbed Mysteries: Performances of Childbirth in the Late Middle Ages |
| 2002–2003 | Kalman Bland | Duke University | Animals, Technology, and Souls: Human Identity in Medieval Jewish Thought |
| 2003–2004 | Thomas Brothers | Duke University | Crossing and Passing in Musical New Orleans, 1890–1920 |
| 2004–2005 | Michael Gillespie | Duke University | The Unity and Disunity of Modernity |
| 2006–2007 | Fiona Somerset | Duke University | Feels Like Saints: Lollard Affect and the Contestation of Holiness, 1370–1550 |
| 2007–2008 | Sucheta Mazumdar | Duke University | From the Slave Trade to the Opium Rush: The America-China Trade |
| 2008–2009 | Laurent Dubois | Duke University | The Banjo: A Cultural History |
| 2009–2010 | Gennifer Wiesenfeld | Duke University | Imagining Disaster: Visual Culture in Japan after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake |
| 2010–2011 | Thomas Pfau | Duke University | Parables of Life: “Bildung” and the Transformation of Knowledge, 1780–1924 |
| 2011–2012 | Vincent Brown | Duke University | The Coromantee Wars: An Archipelago of Insurrection |
| 2012–2013 | Robert Mitchell | Duke University | Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature |
| 2013–2014 | Sumathi Ramaswamy | Duke University | Global Itineraries: The Indian Travels of a Worldly Object |
| 2014–2015 | Hwansoo Kim | Duke University | A Transnational History of Colonial Korean Buddhism (1910–1945) |
| 2015–2016 | Laura Lieber | Duke University | Staging the Sacred: Orchestrating Holiness in Late Antiquity |
| 2016–2017 | Douglas Campbell | Duke University | Depicting Paul: The Book of Acts and History |
| 2017–2018 | Tsitsi Jaji | Duke University | Cassava Westerns: Black Revisions of the American Frontier Myth |
| 2018–2019 | Julianna Barr | Duke University | La Dama Azul: A Native Story of Colonialism |
| 2019–2020 | Mohsen Kadivar | Duke University | Islamic Theocracy in the Secular Age |
| 2020–2021 | Gabriel Rosenberg | Duke University | Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in the Modern United States |
| 2021–2022 | Mbaye Lo | Duke University | Blacks in Arabic Sources: An Intellectual History of Africanism in the Arab World |
| 2022–2023 | Erdağ Göknar | Duke University | Legal and Affective Archives of Atrocity: Allied Occupied Istanbul (1918–23) and the Armenian Genocide |
| 2022–2023 | Gregg Hecimovich | Furman University | The Columbia Seven: The Life and Times of the Zealy Daguerreotypes |
| 2023–2024 | Richard M. Jaffe | Duke University | Spreading Indra’s Net: A Biography of D. T. Suzuki |
| 2024–2025 | Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel | Duke University | Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World |