Our Public Humanities Fellowships help writers, independent scholars, community historians, and college and university faculty members share meaningful research, stories, and cultural expressions that are relevant to Virginia’s diverse communities and that connect audiences to wider regional, national, and global contexts. If you’re engaged in the public humanities, and you’re interested in sharing your work with a wider audience, we’d love to hear from you.  

Since 1974, we’ve awarded more than 400 fellowships for projects that help Virginians better understand the state, Virginia’s role in the world, and each other.

About Our Public Humanities Fellowships 

All Public Humanities Fellows will receive a $15,000 stipend to support a four-month project. 

Fellows will receive access to both the University of Virginia’s library system and the archives available at the Library of Virginia to complete their projects. They will become part of a community of fellows working on innovative humanities topics in the public interest and will have the opportunity to share their ideas with other fellows working in related fields. They may also have the opportunity to participate in programs such as our With Good Reason radio show and podcast, Virginia Festival of the Book’s Shelf Life, and the Library of Virginia’s UncommonWealth blog. 

Preference will be given to projects that engage the public in meaningful and creative ways and explore issues around public humanities topics related to subjects such as history, literature, religion, community stories. 

Timeline

  • Applications will close Tuesday, March 31, 2026
  • Applicants will be notified of decisions in May 2026

Public Humanities Fellow 2026

Woman in plaid shirt on a dock near a lake, representing public humanities fellowships

Aldona Dye is an independent scholar and genealogist living in Madison County, Virginia. She received her PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies of Music from the University of Virginia in 2021 with a dissertation that explored the work of several prolific women folk song collectors from the early 20th century. She runs a genealogical research business, Olive Mill Genealogy, and an Instagram page @vernacular.graves that celebrates the creative, caring, and resourceful ways people make memorials. She is currently involved in reviving the Virginia Folklore Society as a community group for those interested in Virginia folkways, along with Daniel and an intrepid group of curious enthusiasts.

Man wearing headphones and a Seed Savers Exchange hat outdoors

Daniel Bachman is an artist, musician, and independent scholar primarily interested in the folk histories of Virginia. Bachman has released 14 full length records since 2011, and toured extensively internationally and throughout the US, garnering wide acclaim. Select performances include the NPR Tiny Desk Concert, Pitchfork Festival, and Solid Sound Festival, as well as a New York Climate Week exhibit at the Empire State Plaza and NY State Capitol. In recent years Bachman has abandoned a rigorous touring schedule to explore multimedia projects centered on Virginia’s long history of settler colonialism and how it relates to contemporary climate breakdown. He currently lives in Madison County, Virginia with his partner Aldona Dye and their cat Little Baby.

Woman in yellow plaid dress and black heels poses outdoors near water

Dr. Jamie LH Goodall is a historian with the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C. She has a PhD in History from The Ohio State University with specializations in Atlantic World, Early American, and Military histories. Her publications include Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars (2020); National Geographic’s Pirates: Shipwrecks, Conquests, and Their Lasting Legacies (2021); Pirates & Privateers from Long Island Sound to Delaware Bay (2022); and The Daring Exploits of Pirate Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean (2023).

This examines how maritime violence, plunder, & unfree labor shaped Virginia’s economy & society within a broader Atlantic world that stretched from the Chesapeake to the Caribbean, highlighting the agency & resistance of marginalized people. Virginia’s ports served as crucial nodes in Caribbean trade networks, with tobacco ships sailing to Barbados, Jamaica, & other islands, returning with sugar, rum, molasses, & enslaved peoples who brought Caribbean cultural practices & resistance strategies. Pirates who terrorized Caribbean shipping sought refuge in Virginia’s rivers & inlets, while Virginia privateers hunted vessels in West Indian waters. Enslaved Virginians were sold to Caribbean plantations, creating family separations & diaspora connections, while some escaped bondage by fleeing to Caribbean ports or joining multiracial pirate crews that operated between Virginia & the islands. The project treats Virginia not as an isolated colonial outpost but as an integral part of a dynamic Caribbean-Atlantic maritime world where cultures, commodities, & people circulated continuously, shaping identities & possibilities.

Public Humanities Fellow 2025

Lincoln Lewis is the Climate Equity Doctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia and is also a PhD Candidate in the Constructed Environment program. He studies how coastal communities – especially those with historic cultural assets – plan for the future amidst dynamic environmental change. Previously, Lincoln was a staff member of the World Bank, a civil servant with the Singapore Ministry of National Development, and a researcher studying territorial development in Indonesia. Lincoln maintains his architecture license in Singapore and has contributed to projects throughout Southeast Asia.

Lincoln’s expertise and work has been awarded across several built environment disciplines in multiple countries. In the United States, his documentation of the Tangier Island Watermen Working Landscape with Andy Packwood won the Historic American Landscapes Survey Challenge from the National Park Service. His long-term engagement with the Town of Scottsville and the University of Virginia won two state-wide awards from the American Planning Association. Lincoln holds degrees from the University of Kansas and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich.

For the Public Humanities Fellowship, Lincoln will assist the Tangier Island History Museum by facilitating conversations about how the community’s multiple storylines can best be captured. This is especially important due to the challenges the island and its museum collection are facing, including the risk of disaster due to tidal flooding and storms. In collaboration with the community, Lincoln will create a digital archive of the museum’s key holdings. The work aims to inform how other community museums can gather, document, and disseminate their shared local knowledge.

Public Humanities Fellows 2024

Tev’n Powers is a software engineer, independent researcher, and community organizer from Virginia Beach. With over a decade of combined industry and freelance experience spanning across computational linguistics, data visualization, and web development, he believes in the power of using language and data together to tell dynamic and complex stories.

His archival research project “Fugitive Data Portraits: Self-Emancipation in Virginia” uses the Library of Virginia’s “Runaway and Escaped Slaves Records, 1794, 1806-1863,” collection as an entry point through which we learn about the lived experiences of enslaved Black people and their escapes from chattel slavery in the Commonwealth. These records, from various counties across Virginia, document people who self-emancipated during the Civil War and in some cases enslaved people who were captured during their escape.

“Fugitive Data Portraits” is an online series of interactive data visualizations that illuminate trends and patterns in what is documented of Black Virginians’ escapes from slavery. Contextualized by individual accounts of self-emancipation, these data portraits provide a glimpse into the identities and experiences of some of Virginia’s earliest freedom fighters, who often become footnotes in or altogether omitted from the historical record and narratives of Black resistance. While the runaway slave records provide the foundation for this research, this project interweaves narratives of slavery and rebellion from various historical archives, oral histories, and non-fiction writings to craft a multidimensional view of the ways Black Virginians resisted their oppression, fostered community, and sustained their lives.

L. Renée is a poet, nonfiction writer, and story collector. Nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and two Pushcart Prizes, her work has been published in Obsidian, Tin House Online, Poetry Northwest, minnesota review, American Life in Poetry and elsewhere. She won the National Association of Black Storytellers’ 2023 Black Appalachian Storyteller Fellowship, representing the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the 2024 Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award for Ethnology at the Library of Congress. Her honors include The Arkansas International 2023 Editor’s Choice Poetry Prize, the international 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize, and Appalachian Review’s 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award.

A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Watering Hole, L. Renée holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. lreneepoems.com

L. Renée’s project seeks to expand cultural and historical understandings of 20th century Black life, foodways, folklore, and material culture through research and oral histories collected from Black elders in Appomattox, Pittsylvania, and Pulaski Counties. The project will culminate in a publicly staged reading and interdisciplinary performance, “Comin Up on the Rough Side of the Mountain,” featuring poems, archival images, photographs, artifacts, songs, and audio clips probing what inheritance means to descendants of people once considered property themselves and offering strategies of resilience and resistance to preserve cultural traditions.

Donovan Schaefer is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books on the relationship between emotion, power, society, and religion.

His current research considers the affective dynamics of public material culture, especially Confederate commemoration. His project for the Virginia Public Humanities Fellowship explores a number of questions. What do monuments do? How do they shape public life? What roles have they played in US history since the Civil War? Why have they become so prominent in our present moment? And what’s at stake in their removal, transformation, defacement, or continued existence?

In addition to researching the history of Confederate commemoration in Virginia, his project will involve a public-facing website, “False Image of History: Perspectives on Confederate Commemoration from the Black Press,” the result of a multi-year study of Black journalists’ responses to Confederate commemoration from Reconstruction to the present.

Public Humanities Fellows 2023

Matthew Slaats has a 20 year history working at the intersection of participatory democracy, the arts, community development, and alternative economics to support grassroots, community lead decision-making, resilience, and liberation. This work covers a wealth of territory, from environmental to food justice projects, participatory budgeting to public art.

Matthew is presently completing a Ph.D at the University of Virginia School of Architecture partnering with public housing residents to tell their history of Black led social transformation in the Southern US. At the same time, he is consulting with the City of Richmond on the creation of a city wide participatory budgeting initiative that will give residents a say over $3 million annually of the City budget. Throughout all these efforts he seeks to balance practice and scholarship to explore the meaning and infrastructures that drive community lead transformation.

Redevelopment – Our Community/Our Selves is the continuation of a deep partnership with Charlottesville based Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR). The project will use oral histories to tell the important process of public housing redevelopment, which PHAR has led and stands in contrast with the demolish of public housing communities across the US. Together, centering the voices of residents, we will tell what has made this possible, the lived experiences of residents going through the process, the ongoing struggles, and the vision they have for the future. We will then work with the National Public Housing Museum to place these stories in relationship to a breadth of others to show the vitality and vision that is held in all public housing sites.

Elsabe (Ina) Dixon is a historical consultant and a Danville, Virginia enthusiast. As a historical consultant, Ina assists private developers in historical rehabilitation projects and works closely with local communities to ensure that each project captures its peopled history. Ina’s current work focuses on the past, present, and future of a textile company, Dan River Mills, and their mill village of Schoolfield in Danville. Ina has a PhD in American Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she wrote her dissertation on the racial and economic legacy of Dan River Mills. With the support of this Public Humanities Fellowship, Ina will further the story of Dan River Mills and its village with a physical and digital exhibit for public display in revitalized buildings within Schoolfield.

Perri Meldon is a PhD candidate at Boston University, where she studies environmental and public history. Her dissertation explores the creation of Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, with a focus on land management and multispecies interactions from the Reconstruction Era to the present. She also serves as a History Fellow with the National Park Service, assisting with historic preservation and interpretive and educational programming. Perri lives in Charlottesville, VA.

“Mapping Conservation and Cultural Heritage in the Great Dismal Swamp” documents the wetland’s environmental and social histories. This “interpretive tour” will integrate audio and visual features into a 360-degree virtual exploration, to be featured on Encyclopedia Virginia. “Mapping Conservation and Cultural Heritage” arrives at a critical time, as the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2024. As a protected landscape, the swamp is a migratory waterfowl habitat and a treasured recreational site. Prior to the Civil War, the swamp also served as a site of marronage, or self-emancipation of enslaved African Americans. While local black and Nansemond communities have long recognized the swamp’s cultural value, the wildlife refuge has only recently come to interpret these histories of placemaking.

This mapping project will highlight how southeast Virginia’s unique ecosystem fostered an environment of enslaved resistance; logging and natural resources extraction; and the passing-on of fishing and hunting traditions. It will invite visitors to explore the Great Dismal Swamp remotely from their home and reflect on its importance to Virginia—indeed, American—history.

Alicia Marbury Aroche is an award-winning film writer, director, and producer, whose work has been recognized in the U.S. and internationally, including Toronto, Montréal, Madrid, and Cannes.  One of her recent films, Sunlight Around the Corner, won best short documentary at the Festival International du Pan Africain de Cannes, in Cannes, France in 2021.   In the U.S., Alicia’s work has been screened or exhibited at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, PA;  Galaxy Gives in New York, NY;  and the Academy-Award qualifying RSF Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival.  

For the Public Humanities Fellowship, Alicia will become immersed in funk, jazz, and soul archival and field research, and also delve into the historical and present-day contexts of Richmond, VA as critical aspects of this narrative.  Funk, jazz, and soul music hold special significance and meaning in the U.S. Black culture.  They have been awakening and healing forces, and the soundtrack for safety, celebration, joy, and pain.  This project aims to pay homage to artists with Richmond origin stories, or who spent formative years in the city.  Many have gone on to become influencers and pioneers in these genres and beyond.  Some of these artists we know by name, some we know by the music. 

Activated through film, this research will be bracketed by stories and performances from multigenerational and up-and-coming Richmond-based artists who will reflect on these musicians’ influences, and how they envision themselves carrying these legacies forward. 

Hunter Shackelford is a Black nonbinary multidisciplinary artist, writer, and independent researcher. Their work focuses on the historical impacts of antiblack terror and gendered violence within our contemporary worlds. Their project, Afrolantica: Virginia’s Fugitive Legacies, is an art-research project that seeks to unearth the disappeared stories of fugitive slaves of Virginia who found their own versions of freedom through any means necessary. Using Black feminist frameworks and socially-engaged design, Afrolantica seeks to answer the question: ‘Who is Virginia to the Maroon, and who is the Maroon to Virginia?’ As Saidiya Hartman names, we are living in the afterlife of slavery. We are, then, always in temporal kinship to the means used to escape it. Afrolantica will be presented as an art exhibition in the fall of 2023.

Dr. Ma’asehyahu Isra-Ul  is a 25th year educator/historian carrying a Postgraduate Professional Teaching License with endorsements in History & Social Sciences/Admin. & Sup. PreK-12. He has earned certificates in Advanced Spanish (Cuauhnáhuac Institute of Language and Culture) and Jewish Context & Culture Studies (Israel Bible Institute). He also holds four double content degrees in education and history—a Bachelor of Arts, Master’s of Education, Education Specialist and Doctor of Education from Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia respectively. He is the host of the Leading By History Podcast and founder of the Black Judaic Heritage Center.

His project-Through the spectacles of Ethiopia: Garveyism, Black Judaism and the Virginia Commonwealth-is a research-based project that aims to explore the intersection of Garveyism, Black Judaism, and the state of Virginia in the early 20th century. This project seeks to explain the philosophy of Marcus Garvey and how it influenced early Black Judaic/Jewish groups in Virginia. The research for this project will involve an extensive review of historical documents, including primary and secondary sources. The project will also involve interviews with scholars and experts in the fields of Garveyism and Black Judaism. Additionally, the project will include field research in Virginia to examine the historical context of early Black Judaic communities.

Support the next generation of Virginian scholarship.

The Fellowship program relies on endowed and named fellowships to uncover stories about Virginia’s history and culture. Be a part of this valuable work by funding a Fellowship today.

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