Elon University professors Clyde Ellis and Yoram Lubling have been selected as Senior Faculty Research Fellows for the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 academic years. A recommendation from the Presidential Task Force on Scholarship, the competitive program was estabalished to support senior faculty in their ongoing scholarly work.
The award for respected and well-published professors comprises four course reassignments over a period of two years (two releases each year) to allow senior faculty to pursue their research.
Ellis, an expert in American Indian history, culture, and traditions, will undertake the first-ever comprehensive, book-length study of North Carolina’s American Indian communities. Drawing on scholarly traditions in history, anthropology, folklore, political science and ethnography, his work will examine “the complicated political, religious, material, economic, and social frames of identity that exist among and between the various tribes.”
As such, the work seeks to explicate the lived experiences of native people in North Carolina.
Lubling, a professor of philosophy, will undertake several scholarly works. That includes completion of a book analyzing the historical concept of personhood in philosophy that argues the ways in which John Dewey’s “naturalistic account of personhood – ‘habits constitute self’ – provides a necessary corrective to traditional dualistic accounts” of personhood.
He will also edit a collection of Elon students’ essays on R.W. Emerson’s influence on other American thinkers, and contribute to and edit a book with colleagues in the Department of Philosophy regarding the notion of transformation in higher education.
A committee of faculty from diverse disciplines selects recipients of the Senior Faculty Research Fellowship. In their proposals, the Fellowship recipients demonstrated that they are positioned to conduct and complete a robust and feasible project of significance to the scholar as well as wider audiences.
A call for applications for the next Senior Faculty Research Fellows will be announced in fall 2010.
– Information submitted by Maurice J. Levesque, associate dean of Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, and professor of psychology