2024 Newcombe Fellows

Twenty-two Fellows have been named to the 2024 class of the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, administered by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.

The Newcombe Fellowship, funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, is the largest and most prestigious award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values in interesting, original, or significant ways. Fellows receive a 12-month award of $31,000 to support the final year of dissertation writing.

Fellows in this year’s class are working in fields such as anthropology, geography, history, music, and philosophy. They are exploring diverse topics, such as imperial legacies, cultural and religious practices in the diaspora, and intersectionality and identity. The group includes the Robert M. Adams-Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow in Philosophy, co-named for distinguished philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams, the program’s co-founder, as well as two Carpenter-Newcombe Fellows jointly supported by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. (See the full list of Fellows, institutions, and dissertation titles below.)

Funding at the dissertation stage remains a vital way to support up-and-coming scholars. Since its creation in 1981, the Fellowship has supported over 1,300 doctoral candidates with essential time and resources to complete their writing. Newcombe Fellows have gone on to be noted faculty at domestic and foreign institutions, leaders in their fields of study, Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and more.

The Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship helps promising scholars generate momentum, strengthening fields of study, and preparing new generations of citizens through their teaching and research. For more information on the Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, please visit citizensandscholars.org/fellowships/newcombe/.

 2024 Newcombe Fellows

Susan Shoshan Abraham |University of Virginia, Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
Narrating Faith Across the Straits: Morisco Manuals of Faith in Tunis and the Early Modern Mediterranean

Arielle Xena Alterwaite | University of Pennsylvania, Department of History
Empire of Debt: Haiti and France in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

*Italo Alves | Loyola University Chicago, Department of Philosophy
The Social Aesthetics of Recognition

*Robert M. Adams-Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow in Philosophy

Chantal Croteau |University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Department of Anthropology
Contentious Relations: Kinship, Personhood, and Extractive Industry in Thailand

Aurelien Davennes | University of Southern California, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity
Vodou in Magic City: Migration and Subjective Formation Among the Haitian Diaspora of Miami

Christene Alisa Diehr | University of California, Berkeley, Department of History
Paying your dues: the birth of the tithe in Carolingian Francia 

Nikianna Dinenis | Princeton University, Department of History
Women Readers in the Holy Roman Empire , 1400-1600

Alaa El-Shafei | Columbia University, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Convicts on the Nile: Prisons and the Making of Modern Egypt

S. Freeman | University of California, Berkeley, Department of Geography
Quantifying Mobility: The Politics of Humanitarian Data Collection in South Sudan

Miranda M. Garcia | University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology
Entrepreneurs and the Search for Dignity in Post-Castro Cuba

Hannah Hoover | University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology
Networking Households, Building a Nation: A Study of Yamasee Towns in Colonial South Carolina

Clio Isaacson | Rutgers University, Department of History
Women of the Nahuatl Annals: Writing the Lives of Women in Late Pre-Hispanic and Early Colonial Mexico

**Sierra L. Lawson | UNC Chapel Hill, Department of Religious Studies
Spilled Milk, Spilled Blood: Breastmilk, Genealogy, and Religion in Transatlantic Spanish Empire

**Carpenter/Newcombe Fellow

Savannah Sather Marquardt | Yale University, Department of History of Art
Chthon: Material Eschatology and Burial in Colonial Southern Italy (5th-4th c BCE)

Ariel Mond | Rutgers University – New Brunswick, Department of History
Politics Imprisoned: Political Prisoners and the Making of Democracy, Decolonization, and Human Rights in Postwar France, 1945-1975

Kelvin Ng | Yale University, Department of History
Vernacular Equality: Migration and Resistance in the Indian Ocean, c. 1920–1950

Kori Kazimierz Rozalia Pacyniak | University of California, Riverside, Department for the Study of Religion
Sacred Bodies, Sacred Lives: Trans Catholic Joy, Resistance, and Liberation

Jiya Pandya | Princeton University, Department of History and Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies
Broken Bodies, Handicapped Nation: Conceptualizing Disability and Welfare in Indian Nation-Building, 1920s-1990s

Katherine Scahill | University of Pennsylvania, Department of Music
The gendered politics of religious authority in Thai Buddhism: Voice, embodiment, and sonic efficacy in the movement for female monastic ordination

Fred Shaia | Brown University, Department of Political Science
Equity in a Warming World: The Global South and the Making of the International Climate Regime, 1972-2022

Nimisha Thakur | Syracuse University, Department of Anthropology
River song: Riverine ethics and autonomy on the Brahmaputra floodplains

**Mariah E. Webber | University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Feminist Studies
Capturing Intimacies: Collaged Explorations of Black Sexuality in Strip Club Culture

**Carpenter/Newcombe Fellow