Emerging Scholar's Prize

Emerging Scholar's Prize (see the video)

The Institute for the Humanities is delighted to announce the winner of its second Emerging Scholars Prize in the Humanities: Bethany Moreton, selected as the result of a national/international search for nominations through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes membership, holds a 2006 PhD in history from Yale, and is currently Assistant Professor of History and Woman’s Studies at the University of Georgia.

Moreton studies the conjunction of corporate and evangelical religious practices in America, the “Wal-Martization” of the fundamentalist Christian church and the role of this church in driving consumer markets in the United States. Combining the cool eye of the journalist, the sympathetic ear of the anthropologist and the critical intelligence of the scholar/writer, Moreton teases out of this conjunction themes of economy, religious spectacle, fast food society, identity, family, belonging and gender, themes which together go a long way towards limning the contours of American society. Her work is idiomatic, imaginative and written with knife-like incisiveness. Moreton’s book, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, is forthcoming by Harvard Press in 2009, and she is hard at work on an expansion of the project.

Outside evaluator Kathy Woodward, Director of the Simpson Humanities Center at the University of Washington, stated:

Moreton’s work is a model of public scholarship in the humanities, rigorous, sympathetic to individual stories, wonderfully written, combining attention to individual story with command of the complex intersection of corporate culture and religious practice. It provides insight into one of the most prevalent, and inscrutable, features of American society today.

Emerging Scholar Honorable Mention:  Bulbul Tiwari Dr. Tiwari is a 2008 recipient of a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and the third person in the country to have submitted her PhD in entirely digital form. Her work blurs the distinction between scholarship and documentary filmmaking and ranges from studies of the heritage of the great Indian epics to documentary films about self-employed women’s associations in India, one act plays and comic films about truckers in India.

She has done stints as filmmaker in residence in India, Great Britain and the United States and in Centers of Humanistic Scholarship at a number of major American universities. In celebrating her work, the Institute celebrates new digital formulations of the humanities, and also the humanities created between multiple kinds of media. She is an emblem of innovation.

Kathy Woodward added, “Tiwari proves you don’t have to be in a research job at a university to grow the humanities, nor contribute to and understand of heritage. And you can make work that addresses K-12 as well as articulated film and scholarly communities. Hers is an act of breadth as well as depth.”

The Emerging Scholars Prize carries a stipend of $25,000, the Honorable Mention of $1,000. The Institute for the Humanities offers its warmest congratulations to both recipients.

Emerging Scholars Prize 2009-2010

Bethany Moreton
Assistant Professor, History and Women’s Studies, University of Georgia
Honorable Mention:  Bulbul Tiwari, independent scholar and filmmaker

Emerging Scholars Prize 2008-2009

Boris Kment
Assistant Professor, Philosophy, University of Michigan
Honorable Mention: Erica Lehrer, Assistant Professor, Concordia University
Honorable Mention:  and Susana Draper, Assistant Professor, Princeton University