Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, professor of history and African-American studies at Penn State, has been named a fellow by the National Humanities Center for 2014-15. She joins 40 leading scholars worldwide representing scholarship in anthropology, art history, classics and archaeology, communications studies, history, law, literature, political science, philosophy and religion. Each Fellow will work on an individual research project and will have the opportunity to share ideas in seminars, lectures and conferences at the center.
A distinguished scholar and teacher, Woodruff is a U.S. social historian with an interest in African-American history and the social and political history of the U.S. South. Her book, "American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta," focused on the African-American freedom struggle in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the 20th century. The book was published by Harvard University Press in 2003 and in paperback by University of North Carolina Press in 2013. It received the 2004 McClemore Prize and Honorable Mention for the 2004 Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change Book Prize.
At the National Humanities Center, Woodruff will complete the writing of her forthcoming book on "The Legacies of Everyday Struggle: History, Memory, and Trauma in Grenada, Miss., in the Post Civil Rights Era." She is a member of the history department faculty in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State.
The National Humanities Center is a privately incorporated independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978 the center has awarded fellowships to more than 1,300 scholars in the humanities, whose work at the center has resulted in the publication of more than 1,500 books in all fields of humanistic study. The center also sponsors programs to strengthen the teaching of the humanities in secondary and higher education. This funding is made possible by the center's endowment, by grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by contributions from alumni and friends of the center.