UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Christina Snyder, McCabe Greer Professor of the American Civil War Era in Penn State’s Department of History, has been named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Snyder was among 188 scholars and artists from 52 fields chosen for their “prior career achievement and exceptional promise,” according to the foundation, which was established in 1925 by Sen. Simon Guggenheim. All fellows receive a stipend to pursue their work under “the freest possible conditions.”
"The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the greatest honors of my career,” Snyder said. “I'm floored to be joining a group of fellows that includes some of my favorite writers as well as esteemed scholars from many disciplines. I'm grateful to the History Department at Penn State for being such a supportive and stimulating intellectual home as I developed this project."
“I sincerely congratulate Christina on receiving this rare and highly prestigious accolade,” said Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts. “She is a first-rate historian conducting essential scholarship, and I am thrilled this Guggenheim Fellowship will provide her with additional support as she pursues her important work.”
Also receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship this year is Amara Solari, professor of art history and anthropology. To learn more about the research she'll conduct thanks to the award, check out this story.
A historian focused on North American colonialism, race and slavery from the pre-contact era through the late 19th century, Snyder has received numerous accolades for her work, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the John H. Dunning Prize, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Prize, the James H. Broussard Prize and the John C. Ewers Prize. She is the author of the acclaimed books “Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson” (Oxford University Press, 2017) and “Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America” (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Snyder will use her Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her third book, “American Abolitions: The Slow Death and Many Afterlives of Slavery,” which will explore the various efforts to abolish or prohibit slavery in North America between the 16th and 19th centuries. She has received additional support for the project via fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Penn State’s Humanities Institute and Center for Humanities and Information.
“The story of American slavery was once safely quarantined in the antebellum South, where it did not threaten a cherished national narrative focused on freedom, but mounting evidence demonstrates that American bondage had a much longer scale and broader scope,” Snyder said. “My first book joined a wave of scholarship that uncovered slavery in surprising places: colonial Santa Fe, Ivy League campuses, St. Louis trading houses, Montreal kitchens, Cherokee plantations. Despite the wealth of new scholarship, we do not yet have a synthetic work that revisits fundamental questions about American slavery and American freedom. ‘American Abolitions’ is a step in that direction.”
Meanwhile, Snyder has been involved in a number of collaborative projects. With Michael Schaller, Janette Thomas Greenwood, Andrew Kirk, Sarah J. Purcell and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, she is the co-author of the textbook “American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context,” now in its fourth edition through Oxford University Press. And with Thomas G. Andrews, Ari Kelman, Amy Lonetree and Mary E. Mendoza, she’s the co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press book series “Many Wests,” as well as host of the associated McCabe Greer Manuscript Workshop at Penn State.
In addition, Snyder has written more than 25 articles and review essays, and has received additional support for her research through the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society and the American Philosophical Society.
Snyder’s scholarly interests can be traced to her hometown of Macon, Georgia, where she grew up surrounded by buildings and monuments tied to the city’s pre- and post-Civil War past, as well as the physical remnants of its Native American history. While these complicated legacies begged for closer examination, very little was said about them, she said.
“As a scholar,” Snyder said, “I am still driven by that desire to explore the silences that so often envelop the past, and to close the gap between the history that most people know and the stories of marginalized people that are an integral part of American history.”