The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities offers residential fellowships to scholars and writers in the humanities.

We seek applications that are intellectually stimulating, imaginative, and accessible to the public. There are no restrictions on topic, and applications are invited from across the broad spectrum of the humanities.

Recent VFH Fellows Working on Civil War Topics

William Freehling

William Freehling, VFH Senior Fellow, recently completed Showdown in Virginia(UVA Press, 2010), an edited record of the Virginia State Convention in 1861, referred to as the most important body of primary source material about the breakup of the Upper South. Professor Freehling is now working on a new biography of Abraham  Lincoln,  Lincoln’s Growth and America’s. 

Deborah A. Lee

Deborah A. Lee is an independent scholar and consulting public historian.  Her book project, Trouble the Water: Antislavery Activism in the Middle Potomac Region, examines the eastern borderland of slavery and freedom between 1810 and 1865, including parts of Virginia, where diverse activists worked together and separately to resist and gradually end slavery.

Tatiana van Riemsdijk

Tatiana van Riemsdijk teaches history at the University of British Columbia. In her book project,  Politics of Piety: Sunday Schools and African Colonization Activity in Rural Virginia, 1790 -1840, Prof. van Riemsdijk  explores three reform initiatives in Virginia: white Sunday schools, black Sunday schools, and the colonization of liberated slaves in Liberia.