Singer named NEH professor

Wendy F. Singer, professor of history, has been named to Kenyon's National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Distinguished Teaching Professorship. She will hold the prestigious post for a three-year term, beginning with the 2004-05 academic year.

The NEH professorship is awarded through a competitive process that involves submission of a proposal to a selection committee. Singer's proposal was entitled "Human Migration, Diaspora, and Globalism."

In her proposal, Singer outlined a program through which students can explore human migration around the world, through classwork at Kenyon as well as through study abroad. "The goal is to bring Kenyon students and faculty into a larger conversation about globalism that potentially includes colleagues and students in England, France, India, and Australia."

"The selection committee was impressed with Professor Singer's vision of how to engage students in a topic that is central to her own scholarship," says Associate Provost Rita S. Kipp. "Her current research on Tibetans models the kind of project she wants her students to pursue, and we think the students in this program will find her enthusiasm and energy infectious."

A member of the faculty since 1988 and at various times the director of the international studies program, Singer earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the University of Virginia. For two decades, she has visited and lived in India to study its history and politics. Singer's research has been supported in the past by the Fulbright-Hayes Senior Research Program, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association of University Women, and the NEH.

While most of Singer's recent work has focused on Indian elections, her latest project returns to issues raised in her book Creating Histories: Oral Narratives and the Politics of History-Making, which addresses the local politics of India's freedom movement. Similarly, the migration project that she will undertake as the NEH professor will incorporate oral narratives about the culture of migration.

The current incumbent of the NEH professorship is George E. McCarthy, a professor of sociology. Singer is currently on sabbatical as a By-Fellow at Churchill College at Cambridge University.