Chair of the Department of Gender, Race, and Identity (GRI) at the ΒιΆΉΣ³» and Associate Professor in GRI and the Department of History, Emily Hobson, was chosen for a National Humanities Center Fellowship for the 2024-25 academic year.
“It’s a tremendous honor,” Hobson said. “I’m really pleased to have the fellowship and the time to focus on writing and research.”
Of 492 applicants, 31 Fellows were selected from the United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong, the United States and the District of Colombia. This will be the 47th class admitted since 1978 when NHC first began. Hobson is only the second ΒιΆΉΣ³» faculty member to be selected as an NHC Fellow, after Scott Casper, Foundation Professor of History, was awarded in 2005.
From the NHC web announcement, Robert D. Newman, president and director of the NHC, talked about the selection process.
“They [the fellows] were selected from a highly competitive group of applicants representing institutions from across the globe,” Newman said.
Awarding about $1.5 million in fellowship grants this fiscal year allows scholars to take time from teaching to focus on writing and research at the Center in Durham, North Carolina.
“It’s always difficult for faculty to find the time to prioritize writing in the midst of teaching and administrative work, and fellowship leave is invaluable,” Hobson said.
Every fellow will work on their own individual research project. Hobson said she is looking forward to learning from others, including those whose fields and topics are distinct from her own. She is also expecting to do some networking and reach a wider public audience for her work.
Hobson’s NHC research project will focus on AIDS and Abolition: A History of Care Work against the Carceral State.
More specifically, her work will look at the history of HIV and AIDS activism by, for, and with people in prisons in the 1980s and 1990s United States.
“My project examines efforts by both incarcerated and non-incarcerated people to respond to the first 15 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” Hobson said. “I examine how incarcerated people organized peer education and care work with each other, and how they worked to push prison administrations to provide better healthcare and better resources to address the epidemic. Another focus of the project is looking at the collaboration between incarcerated people and non-incarcerated activists in the AIDS movement.”
Hobson said her work mainly focuses on interconnections between social movements that one usually thinks about as separate.
“My first book was about gay and lesbian involvement in anti-war activism and support of Black Power,” she said. “This project builds on that in unexpected ways. I’m interested in how we tell the stories of how seemingly different social justice movements are often very interconnected and shape each other.”
In the future, Hobson plans to continue research in social movement history, to incorporate her new book into her teaching, and to advocate for support of humanities research at the University.
