Three UCSB Historians Receive Humanities Fellowships

Three history professors at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been awarded UC President's Research Fellowships in the Humanities. The fellowships are part of an initiative established in 1987 to encourage faculty research in the humanities across the University of California system.

This year's recipients at UCSB include Hilary Bernstein, associate professor of history; Anita Guerrini, professor of history and environmental studies; and Stephan Miescher, associate professor of history.

Bernstein is a specialist in Europe's early modern period through the Renaissance, with a special focus on political, cultural, and urban history. She will use her fellowship to conduct research in Paris for a book project that focuses on the burgeoning culture of history writing in 16th- and 17th-century France.

Guerrini, whose areas of interest include early modern Europe, history of science, and environmental history, will continue work on a book titled "The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris." In it she will examine two anatomists at the end of the 17th century--Claude Perrault and Joseph-Guichard Duverney--and two anatomy projects on which they collaborated at the Paris Academy of Sciences and the King's Garden in Paris. She will explore the intersection of anatomy and natural history, the price of fame in the world of Parisian science, and the role of animals in the scientific revolution.

Miescher is an associate professor of history and specialist in Africa. He also received a fellowship from the prestigious American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and chose to decline the UC President's Fellowship in the Humanities in favor of the ACLS award.

He will use his ACLS stipend to conduct research in Ghana, West Africa, for his book titled "Akosombo Stories: The Volta River Project, Modernity, and Nationhood in Ghana." The book explores the Volta River Project and its significance in Ghana's development as a nation.

The ACLS is a private, non-profit federation of 68 national scholarly organizations that seeks to advance humanistic studies in all areas of the humanities and social sciences while maintaining and strengthening relations among the national societies devoted to such studies.