Marjoleine Kars and Kate Brown, both professors in UMBC’s history department, have been awarded prestigious fellowships to study at the European University Institute (EUI) in Italy for fall 2016.

Kars and Brown are recipients of the Fernand Braduel Senior Fellowships, which “provide a framework for established academics with an international reputation to pursue their research at the EUI. Fellowships last for up to ten months in one of the EUI’s four Departments which in turn invite fellows to participate in departmental activities (seminars, workshops, colloquia, etc.),” according to a description on the EUI website.

During her fellowship, Kars will finish her writing her current book project Freedom Marooned: An Atlantic Slave Rebellion in the Early Modern Dutch Caribbean. She is in the midst of finishing a ten-year research project about a little known but immense eighteenth-century slave rebellion in a Dutch colony in South America (now the Republic of Guyana). Kars has previously written a book about a farmers’ rebellion in pre-revolutionary North Carolina: “Breaking Loose Together”: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and she was a Dresher Center fellow in spring 2015. Read more about her work in the EUI’s announcement of her fellowship.

For her Fernand Braduel Fellowship, Kate Brown will work on her research project Circumnavigation: History’s Renovation in the Age of the Anthropocene. Brown is currently working on a research project about the communities circling the Chernobyl Zone. Earlier this year, Brown was named a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and she has received significant recognition for her 2013 book Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Read more about Brown’s work and research in the EUI announcement.

As part of their residencies, Kars and Brown will also participate in the EUI’s Summer School in Comparative and Transnational History: Theories, Methodology and Case Studies. Kars will present Caribbean Slave Rebellions, Transnational History, and Nationalism and Brown’s talk is titled Soft Bodies: the child centered communities at ground zero of American and Soviet nuclear complexes. 

Learn more about the European University Institute and its prestigious fellowships and research programs on the EUI website.

Images: Marjoleine Kars and Kate Brown. Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.