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Description
The Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship is a highly-competitive national award that funds graduate study and research in any field of study. It was established with the intention of attracting and supporting students of outstanding character and ability who hold promise for achievement and distinction in their chosen fields of study. Research funded by the fellowship must be carried out entirely in the United States. Students must be nominated for the fellowship by their university, and each university is allowed to nominate a up to three students every year. All three of Northwestern's nominees were awarded Liebmann Fellowships for the academic year 2007-2008.
2007-2008 Winners
David Davidson values community. He aspires to a professorship at a small liberal arts college where he can cultivate a community of learners. At Northwestern, David played an instrumental role in nurturing a community of historians and impressed senior faculty with his aplomb at organizing a national conference on the American Revolution. His aptitude at this task coincides with David’s engaging personality. He has earned the affection and respect of his colleagues with his combination of humility and humor.
David has conducted funded research at numerous historical repositories. Although these research excursions allowed David to pursue the comparatively solitary task of reading archival materials, archives create communities. David has learned the ways that scholars from across geographical and intellectual borders form brief yet intense relationships over crumbling folios and cafeteria lunches. While at the beginning of his graduate studies he operated in the heart of the department, he now belongs to the profession as a whole.
Such high-profile research experience is particularly useful to a scholar who has assumed the daunting task of proving that the driven capitalists of the new republic considered the pursuit of individual wealth to complement, not to contradict, their desire for community. David argues that these early American entrepreneurs assumed tremendous risks not only because they wanted to become rich but also because they wanted to improve the world in which they and their compatriots lived. As a semi-professional musician, David understands how his individual bass voice contributes to choral harmonies. He identifies similar collaborations among his historical subjects. David’s academic success follows in the same pattern; it allows him to expand his personal knowledge while enriching the intellectual life of our university and the historical profession.
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A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University with perfect GRE scores might easily get lost in the glare of his own academic credentials. Peter Jaros, though, never rests on his impressive intellectual laurels. From Yale he traveled to Japan to teach English, then returned to the United States and Northwestern’s Department of English, where he flourishes under the guidance of the distinguished early American literary scholars who have gravitated to Northwestern in recent years.
Peter’s thesis focuses upon early national ideas of physiognomy and incorporates research in psychology, which he studied at Yale, literature, and history. Early in his graduate career, Peter took advantage of Northwestern’s outstanding Paris Program in Critical Theory to explore the philosophical and literary underpinnings of his analysis. However, he was not willing to create a theoretical framework without testing it against the product of his archival research. Peter’s selection as a graduate affiliate of Northwestern’s Alice Berline Kaplan Institute for the Humanities further attests to his interdisciplinary commitment.
As a teacher, Peter demands that his students strive to match his own sophisticated level of analysis. While serving as a teaching assistant in an “Introduction to American Literature,” Peter delivered a lecture on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man that introduced his students simultaneously and successfully to the philosophy of history and the influence of Louis Armstrong. Peter deserves a future teaching top-flight undergraduate and graduate students alike. The Liebmann Fellowship will ease his path towards this goal.
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Brian Maxson has followed his academic passions from small town Michigan to Renaissance Florence. En route, he has encountered and conquered the many barriers standing in the way of a working class student with academic aspirations. Fortunately, Brian possessed the fortitude, and his professors possessed the foresight, to advance Brian’s intellectual and scholarly potential.
As an undergraduate, Brian inherited $3,000 from his grandmother. Instead of buying a used car or new stereo, he cut off his blue hair and bought airline tickets for Italy. He flew away from his adolescent rebellion to Florence, the site of 15th Century Europe’s Renaissance and his own. In Italy, he confirmed his passion for the period and place. Brian returned to Michigan State University convinced that he wanted to make Renaissance Florence the center of a future as a professor, a vocation he once thought closed to him.
Brian has worked to overcome the academic deficits of his childhood. With the guidance of first his undergraduate advisers and now Northwestern’s Professor Edward Muir, he has caught up with and surpassed his peers. He spent last year as a Fulbright Scholar in Florence. Brian’s selection as a reviewer for the Sixteenth Century Journal serves as further evidence of his growing status in the scholarly community. His first dissertation chapter demonstrates his aptitude in converting sound research into cogent argument. With the aid of the Liebmann Fellowship, this outstanding young man will be able to complete his ascent from rural rebel to sophisticated scholar.
Last updated: Jun 1 2007 1:36PM
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