CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors – Julie Turnock and Hermann von Hesse – have been awarded 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships.
Turnock is a professor of media and cinema studies in the College of Media, and von Hesse is a professor of art history in the School of Art and Design.
"I extend my congratulations to Professors Turnock and von Hesse on receiving these highly competitive fellowships,” Provost John Coleman said. “We are delighted and proud to have their outstanding achievements recognized on a national level and to have these superb scholars among our faculty.”
The NEH awarded $33.8 million in grants for 260 humanities projects across the country, including 82 fellowships. The fellowship program supports advanced research in the humanities, and recipients produce articles, books, digital materials or other scholarly resources. NEH Fellowships are competitive awards granted to individual scholars pursuing projects that embody exceptional research, rigorous analysis and clear writing.
The NEH has received an average of 1,120 applications per year for fellowships in the last five rounds of competition, according to the NEH website. During that time, it awarded an average of 79 fellowships per year for a funding rate of 7%, making the fellowships among the most competitive humanities awards in the country.
Turnock’s project, “Beyond King Kong: Special Effects in the Hollywood Studio Era, 1915-1965,” is a history of the labor performed by unsung “below-the-line” effects workers of the era. Through archival historical research, oral history accounts, interviews, theoretical discourse and formal visual analyses, this project presents a polemic for considering the “specialness” of effects work not from the point of view of the film but from the position of the specially contracted labor. As a labor history, it centers the workers of the Hollywood studio era who are rarely considered in cinema histories, training attention onto those whose skills make much of “movie magic” possible.
Von Hesse’s project, “Love of Stone Houses: Urban Merchants, Ancestral Spaces and Sacred Objects on Africa’s Gold Coast, 1700-1890,” broadens African and African Atlantic histories and art histories beyond their stereotypical focus on trade goods and sacred relics often associated with African material cultures (especially in the Western imagination) toward property and real estate. Fortified stone houses not only housed ancestors and living kin but also functioned as commercial centers and attracted local, regional and international trade. The project examines how Gold Coast merchant families increasingly collateralized their sacred stone houses and material goods to secure European credit on imported merchandise during the transition away from the transatlantic slave trade. These transformations partly shaped Gã and Fante ideas of value, security, power and vulnerability. This research is the first in African and African diaspora studies to historicize the house as an embodied space of overlapping ancestral and physical security and advances broader understandings of materiality that varied across African cultures and pasts.
In addition to the fellowships, two Illinois researchers received NEH grants. Karen Flynn, the Terrance and Karyn Holm Endowed Professor of Nursing in the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois Chicago and the director of its Midwest Nursing History Research Center, received a Cultural and Community Resilience grant to collect oral histories from African American elders and first responders in East St. Louis to document their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Until recently, Flynn was a professor of gender and women's studies on the Urbana campus, and she is still affiliated with that department and with the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program.
Ana Lučić, a research scientist at the Applied Research Institute, received a Digital Humanities Advancement grant to develop a method to computationally identify the paratextual elements within the digitized book collections in the HathiTrust Research Library.
The NEH is an independent federal agency and one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the U.S. It supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities by funding selected peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.