PhD Candidates in Modern European History Receive Competitive Dissertation Research Fellowships

James Nealy, Thomas Prendergast, and Bill Sharman, all PhD candidates in modern European history, have received competetive fellowships to conduct dissertation research abroad during the 2017-2018 academic year.

James is the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship. In 2018, he will spend nine months in the Russian Federation conducting research for his dissertation project. His work focuses on the social and intellectual history of the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1991. While in the Russian Federation, James will be based primarily in Moscow.

Thomas is the recipient of the Fulbright-IFK Visiting Junior Fellowship, jointly awarded by the Austrian-American Educational Commission and Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK). He will spend the 2017-2018 academic year in Vienna, where he will be conducting research for his dissertation project, entitled In Defense of Empire: Austrian Sociology and the European Nation-State, 1870-1914. His work examines the social scientific languages through which scholars on the geographic and social margins of the Habsburg Monarchy, confronted with the rise of the nation-state, sought to rationalize and legitimize multiethnic empire.

Bill is the recipient of a DAAD fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service for his dissertation project, Moral Politics: Humanitarianism and the Third World in West Germany, which explores West German humanitarian ideas and practices between the 1950s and 1980s. As a DAAD fellow, Bill is based primarily in Berlin, where he is also a visiting student at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute for History and Cultural Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin.

Congrats to James, Thomas, and Bill!