Associate Professor of English and chair of American studies Christopher Benfey has been awarded a prestigious $35,000 senior fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) based in New York. The fellowship is given for postdoctoral research in the humanities and humanities-related social sciences and provides for six to twelve consecutive months of full-time research to be initiated between July 1, 1999 and February 1, 2000. This year, the council received 760 applications for fellowships and awarded sixty-five. Over the past sixty years, more than 3,000 scholars, including many leading figures in the humanities today, have held ACLS Fellowships.
Benfey will use the fellowship to conduct research on "Pacific Overtures: The Boston-Japan Cultural Trade during the Age of Henry Adams." Through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to turn-of-the-century Boston and Meiji-era Japan, he will explore a particularly intense moment of cultural exchange. Benfey will concentrate on four wide-ranging friends: historian Henry Adams, painter John La Farge, and connoisseurs of Asian art Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzo. "I will show that the 'overtures' went both ways across the Pacific, and that a convergence of aesthetic theories, spiritual yearnings, and nationalist politics brought Japan and New England together," he says.
"Chris has now won all of the three major humanities fellowships, which is a stunning accomplishment. In what is an extraordinary faculty, Chris stands out for the sheer elegance of his writing and teaching. We are really proud of him," said Dean of the Faculty Donal O'Shea. Benfey has been awarded Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships in the past. A frequent contributor to the New Republic and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications, his most recent book is Degas in New Orleans. The College's trustees are expected to promote Benfey to full professor at their May meeting.
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