Celebrating its long-time vice president and deputy director, the National Humanities Center established the Kent R. Mullikin Fellowship for scholarship in the humanities in 2011. This fellowship, which honors Dr. Mullikin for his service to the humanities and his remarkable dedication to the Center and its Fellows for over 30 years, was funded by donations from a group of anonymous philanthropists and matching funds from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Educated at Princeton University, Kent received his PhD in English literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served on the staff of the National Humanities Center from its founding in 1976 and, as director of the Center’s scholarly programs, presided over the selection of more than 1,300 scholars for highly-coveted residential fellowships. Successive classes of Fellows were impressed not only by Kent’s personal care and interest but by his ability to recall details about nearly every scholar who came to work at the Center during its first 34 years. He retired in June 2012.
| 2012–2013 | Dyan Elliott | Northwestern University | Scandal: A Hidden Force in Medieval Church History |
| 2013–2014 | Charles McGovern | College of William & Mary | The Civics of American Popular Music: Citizenship, Race, and Belonging, 1930–1972 |
| 2014–2015 | Josephine McDonagh | King’s College London | Literature in a Time of Migration: Print, Population, and the British Nineteenth Century Novel |
| 2015–2016 | Timothy Carter | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Let ’Em Eat Cake: Political Musical Theatre in 1930s America |
| 2016–2017 | Luise White | University of Florida | Fighting and Writing: The Rhodesian Army at War and Post-War |
| 2017–2018 | Keith Howard | University of London | Songs for the ‘Great Leaders’: Creativity and Ideology in the Music and Dance of North Korea |
| 2018–2019 | Robert Morrison | Bowdoin College | An Economy of Knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean |
| 2019–2020 | Iman Sanga | University of Dar es Salaam | Musical Literary Imagination: Musical Figures, Swahili Literature and Postcolonial Social Life in Tanzania |
| 2020–2021 | Michael Johnston | Purdue University | The Reading Nation in the Age of Chaucer: English Books, 1350–1500 |
| 2021–2022 | Maggie M. Cao | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Painting and the Making of American Empire‚ 1830–1898 |
| 2022–2023 | W. Jason Miller | North Carolina State University | Backlash Blues: Nina Simone and Langston Hughes |
| 2023–2024 | Joan Titus | University of North Carolina at Greensboro | Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Thaw-Era Cinema |
| 2024–2025 | Joseph M. H. Clark | University of Kentucky | Witchcraft and Contraband in the Early Modern Caribbean |