2022 Newcombe Fellows

Program Supports Promising Scholars Completing Dissertations Related To Ethics And Religion

PRINCETON, NJ (Thursday, May 5, 2022)—The Institute for Citizens & Scholars has named 22 Fellows to the 2022 class of the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

The Newcombe Fellowship, funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, is the largest and most prestigious award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values in interesting, original, or significant ways. Fellows receive a 12-month award of $30,000 to support the final year of dissertation writing.

Fellows in this year’s class are working in fields such as anthropology, history, government, sociology, and philosophy. They are exploring the role of ethical values in the justification of political institutions, examining how morality is constructed in digital health, and tracing the political, economic, social, and religious factors that shaped Black migration dreams in post-emancipation North Carolina, among other topics. (See the full list of Fellows, institutions, and dissertation titles below.)

Funding at the dissertation stage remains a vital way to support young scholars. Since its creation in 1981, the Fellowship has supported over 1,300 doctoral candidates with essential time and resources to complete their writing. Newcombe Fellows have gone on to be noted faculty at domestic and foreign institutions, leaders in their fields of study, Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and more.

The Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship is a crucial part of the Citizens & Scholars portfolio in higher education, helping promising scholars generate momentum, strengthening fields of study, and preparing new generations of citizens through their teaching and research. For more information on the Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, please visit citizensandscholars.org/fellowships/newcombe/.

About the Institute for Citizens and Scholars
Formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars is a 75-year-old organization that has played a significant role in shaping American higher education. Now, with an expanded mission, Citizens & Scholars prepares leaders and engages networks of people and organizations to meet urgent education challenges. The overarching goal is to shape an informed, productively engaged, and hopeful citizenry.

2022 Newcombe Fellows 

Thir Budhathoki | University of Arizona, English, rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English
Linguistic Justice in Writing Studies: A Decolonial Perspective 

Henry Clements | Yale University, history
The Problem of History in an Age of Reform: Secularism, Orientalism, and the Syriac Christians of the Late Ottoman Empire

Mikey Elster | CUNY Graduate Center, anthropology
Coming of Age in the Clinic: Ethics and Politics of Care in Transgender Pediatrics in New York City

Magnus Ferguson | Boston College, philosophy
On Responsibility for Others’ Harms

Karlie Fox-Knudtsen | Cornell University, anthropology
Mud Spirits and Blood Power: Ethics as Materiality in Kondholand

Gabrielle Girard | Princeton University, history
Modeling Democracy: The Global History of an Argentine Human Rights Experiment

Sarah B. Greenberg | Cornell University, government
“The Law is not in Heaven”: Authority and Covenant in Jewish Political Thought

Laura Halcomb | University of California, Santa Barbara, sociology
Pricing Life: Money and Morality in Healthcare

Mu-Lung Hsu | Arizona State University, religious studies
Lay Buddhism and Embodied Virtues: Free Funeral Service Societies and Buddhist Social Welfare Movement in Contemporary Myanmar

Daniel Joslyn | New York University, history,
How Love Came of Age: God, Sex and Socialism in the Long Nineteenth Century

Eric Kesse | Michigan State University, history
Living with Water: Environment, Slavery, and Spirituality in a West African Stilt-House Community—Nzulezo, c. mid-1700–1870s

Linda Kinstler | University of California, Berkeley, rhetoric
The Afterlives of Oblivion

Natali Levin-Schwartz | University of California, Santa Cruz, politics
Testimony, Resistance, and Sexual Violence: Towards a Political Theory of Testimony as a Democratic Practice

Meghna Mukherjee | University of California, Berkeley, sociology
Immaculate Re-Conception: Redefining Health and Reproductive Risk Using Prenatal Genetic Testing

Arif Nairang | University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, anthropology
Halat chi kharab: Playful Existence in the Time of Political Violence

Emma Prendergast | University of Wisconsin-Madison, philosophy
The Moral Authority of Citizens

Faiza Rahman | Emory University, Islamic civilizations studies
Islamic Period: Menstruation and Muslims in Pakistan

Paloma Rodrigo Gonzales | The Graduate Center, CUNY, anthropology
From Stained Souls to Stained Skins: The Presence of Religious Epistemologies in the Typification of Peruvian Bodies

Rachel Smith | University of California, Los Angeles, history
The Jews of Yesteryear: Ethnography and the Politics of Representation in the Late Ottoman World

Jagat Sohail | Princeton University, anthropology
Paradoxes of Social Incorporation: Hospitality and Hostility in the Reception of Newcomers in Berlin, Germany

Joshua Strayhorn | Duke University, history
Somewhere to Lay My Head: Black Mobility and Migration in North Carolina, 1860–1890

Mira Vale | University of Michigan, sociology
Data Values: Moral Entrepreneurship in Digital Health