UNM faculty members Carmen Nocentelli, assistant professor of English and comparative literature, and Sam Truett, associate professor of history, recently learned they both won long-term fellowships for 2008-2009 at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Nocentelli was chosen the Monticello College Foundation Fellow, and Truett the Lloyd Lewis Fellow in American History.
Photo: Carmen Nocentelli and Sam Truett
Not only have Nocentelli and Truett won two of these eight slots for the University of New Mexico – in the recent past, only the University of Chicago and Northwestern University have claimed more than one slot in a given year – but they were also selected “blind” by committees who had no idea that they were choosing two halves of an academic couple!
In the past, Nocentelli and Truett have been awarded both long-term and short-term fellowships at such research institutions as the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, where Truett is currently finishing a stint as a short-term fellow; but this is also the first time they have been awarded fellowships simultaneously at the same institution.
The Newberry Library is one of the world’s leading research libraries in history and literature of Western Europe and the Americas. Each year it awards roughly eight long-term fellowships to scholars in the humanities around the nation, together with a few others reserved for small consortia of universities primarily in the Midwest.
The Newberry Library is arguably the best single research institution in the nation for their two projects. Nocentelli will be finishing her first book, tentatively titled “Islands of Love: Race, Sexuality, and the Euro-Asian Encounter.”
In the book, Nocentelli explores Early Modern Europe’s fascination with the eros of Asia, and ask how travelogues, poems, novels and plays about the Asian contact zone shaped the ways sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans conceived of their own racial sexual, and cultural identities. The collections of rare European books at the Newberry Library are uniquely suited to this comparative project, which draws on a broad range of Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian and Dutch sources.
Truett will be completing research on his second book project, “Old New Worlds: Ruins, Borderlands, and Empire in America.” In this book, Truett examines the U.S. fascination with ruins and antiquity in the nation’s expanding borderlands, from the eighteenth century on.
As they moved west across the Appalachians to the Mississippi, and later into the U.S. Southwest and onto new tourist frontiers in Mexico and Central America, Americans were captivated by the haunted remains of pre-Columbian civilizations, prior French and Spanish empires, and eventually their own ghosts, most vividly expressed in the western ghost town.
Truett will draw on the rich Native American, Latin American and Western Americana collections at the Newberry Library to track this fascination with ruins across the broad sweep of U.S. frontier and borderlands history.
Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu