Recent Winners of AHA Fellowships
NASA Fellowship
Jenifer Van Vleck is the recipient of the 2007-08 NASA Fellowship. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. She studies the United States in the twentieth century, focusing on the cultural history of U.S. foreign relations. This year, she will be completing her dissertation, "No Distant Places: Commercial Aviation and American Globalism, 1915-1968." Van Vleck argues that aviation inspired a globalist imagination—a way of visualizing the world and the United States' place within it—that proved critical to the ascendance of the United States as a world power. Based on research in ten archives, her project engages with scholarship on empire, nationalism, consumer culture, and globalization. Contributing to the "transnational turn" in historiography, Van Vleck's dissertation uses the history of aviation to examine how the very categories of the national and the global have acquired meaning.
J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History
Peter S. Leavenworth is the recipient of the 2007–08 Jameson Fellowship in American History. Peter S. Leavenworth received his Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire in early American History in 2007. His dissertation, “Accounting For Taste: The Early American Music Business and Secularization in Music Aesthetics, 1720-1825,” concentrates on changes within and interaction between sacred and theater music in the early American republic. Conflicting tastes of practitioners of religious music and secularizing influences from a newly imported urban theater milieu created a series of reforms and consumption patterns that altered the way Americans thought about music. These public and private debates were carried out in diaries, letters, tune book prefaces, newspapers, and magazines and reflected larger theological, economic, and political divisions in an evolving American culture. Leavenworth demonstrates how postcolonial elements of these transformations complicate our understanding of early national cultural formation.
