John G. Medlin Jr. Fellowship

Honoring one of the Center’s most important leaders, the John G. Medlin Jr. fellowship has been awarded annually to scholars affiliated with liberal arts colleges since 2000. Medlin is most well known for expanding the relatively small Wachovia Bank into one of the largest financial companies in the South. Medlin received several accolades during his successful banking career, including the American Banker Award as the most admired CEO in banking as well as the American Banker Lifetime Achievement Award. He also served as a trustee of the Center for many years and helped lead its first capital campaign to endow NHC fellowships.

The John G. Medlin, Jr. fellowship was originally endowed by Medlin’s longtime friend and fellow banker, C. D. Spangler, who led the merger of Bank of North Carolina and North Carolina National Bank Corporation, forming NationsBank, now Bank of America. Additional funding was awarded in 2016 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the largest supporters of the arts and humanities in the United States.

2001–2002	Allen Buchanan	University of Arizona	Humanitarian Intervention, Ethics, and the Rule of Law
2002–2003	Lloyd S. Kramer	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Traveling to Unknown Places: Politics, Religion, and the Cultural Identities of Expatriate Writers, 1780–1960
2003–2004	James L. Peacock	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Exploring Identity in the Global South
2004–2005	Georgia C. Warnke	University of California, Riverside	After Sex: A Hermeneutics of Race and Gender, Color and Sex
2005–2006	Gerald Postema	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	The Discipline of Common Reason
2006–2007	Joseph Viscomi	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	In the Caves of Heaven and Hell
2007–2008	Heather A. Williams	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Information Wanted: Separation and Reunification of African American Families
2008–2009	Mary Floyd-Wilson	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Preternatural Passions: Occult Mentalities and the Everyday in English Renaissance Drama
2009–2010	John Kasson	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
2010–2011	Fred S. Naiden	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Smoke Signals for the Gods
2011–2012	Karen Hagemann	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Revisiting Prussia’s Wars Against Napoleon: War, Culture, Memory
2012–2013	Donald M. Reid	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	The Factory is Where the Workers Are: Constructing Democracy and Community Chez Lip
2013–2014	Andrew J. Jewett	Harvard University	Science and Religion: Toward a Political History of Postwar American Thought
2014–2015	Christopher Melchert	University of Oxford	The Early History of Islamic Ascetism
2015–2016	April Masten	State University of New York, Stony Brook	Diamond and Juba: The Rise and Fall of Challenge Dancing in America
2016–2017	Kim Hall	Barnard College	“Othello was my grandfather”: Race and Shakespeare in the African Diaspora
2017–2018	Laura Murphy	Loyola University New Orleans	The New Slave Narrative
2018–2019	Anton Matytsin	Kenyon College	A History of History: The Académie des inscriptions and the Remaking of the Past
2019–2020	Simon Middleton	College of William & Mary	The Price of the People: Money and Power in Early America
2020–2021	Saundra Weddle	Drury University	Architecture, Mobility, Segregation: The Everyday Spatial Practices of Women in Early Modern Venice
2021–2022	Vance Byrd	Grinnell College	Listening to Panoramas: Sonic and Visual Cultures of Commemoration
2022–2023	Elena Machado Sáez	Bucknell University	Staging Activism in US Latinx Theater
2023–2024	David M. Robinson	Colgate University	Ability and Difference in Early Modern China
2024–2025	Aaron Kamugisha	Smith College	Bewildering Coloniality: Austin Clarke and the Twentieth Century Black Atlantic World