2024-25 Awarded Fellowships

Long-Term Awards

R. STANTON AVERY DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

Susan Scott Parrish, Professor, English, University of Michigan

Topic: The Talking Woods: Black American Life and Its Forest Materials

Susan Scott Parrish is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the English Department and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. Since the 1990s, she has been researching and teaching about the intertwined history of environmental transformation and racial formation in North America, with an ongoing focus on the southern plantation complex. In her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), she analyzed how English colonials, Native Americans, and captive Africans responded to their environmental dislocations in the Americas, and to colonization and slavery, through their interactions with—and knowledge about—the natural world. Her next book continued to examine how American environments and racialized experiences were mutually constituted. The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017) investigated how a massive infrastructural catastrophe in the Lower Mississippi Valley unfolded, and took on divergent meanings, as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides, and across the color line. More recently, she has edited The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Environment and the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Prompted by contemporary Black artists now reimagining historical Black experiences in U.S. woodlands, she is researching her next book: The Talking Woods: Black American Life and Its Forest Materials. She has received support from the American Antiquarian Society, the NEH, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and UM’s Institute for the Humanities.

FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

Susan Amussen, Professor, History, UC Merced

Topic: Placing Patriarchy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire

Susan D. Amussen is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California Merced. She is a historian of early modern Britain and its empire. Her works include An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (1988); Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700 (2007); and (2017). She serves as co-editor of volume 3 (1500-1750) of the New Cambridge History of Britain, which will be published in 2025. While at The Huntington, she will be working on a project entitled “Placing Patriarchy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire” which is a long-term exploration of how patriarchy functions as a system in early modern England, and how it adapts and evolves in relation to other social systems. During the fellowship year, she will be focusing particularly on interactions between patriarchy and race, particularly through the young boys who appear in late 17th century portraits of noble women.