Tamara Venit-Shelton, an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and author of A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850-1900, has been awarded the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
The fellowship awarded to Venit-Shelton supports a year’s residency at the Huntington-USC Institute for California and the West (ICW), where Professor Venit-Shelton will work on her current book project, Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Medicine in the United States. Extending from the late 18th century to the present, Herbs and Roots argues that Chinese medicine has played an important and unacknowledged role in the professionalization of American medicine.
About the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholar: One of the strengths of American higher education is the diversity of institutions that interact but remain distinct. In this educational ecosystem, liberal arts colleges serve as strongholds of the humanities by placing those fields at the core of their curricula. To support recently tenured faculty at these institutions, ACLS has designated a set of Burkhardt Fellowships specifically for them, with awards designed to support ambitious research in the humanities and encourage intellectual networks across types of institutions. These Burkhardt Fellowships support an academic year (nine months) of residence at a university academic department or university-based humanities center of the applicant’s choice. In the 2016-17 competition year, ACLS will award up to 10 Burkhardt Fellowships for residency at the applicant’s proposed location. Each fellowship carries a stipend of $95,000, plus funds for research costs and related scholarly activities of up to $7,500 and for relocation up to $3,000.