History Professor Named Visiting Davis Fellow at Princeton
HARTFORD, Conn. – Susan D. Pennybacker, Borden W. Painter Jr. Associate Professor of European History, has been awarded a highly competitive fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for the fall 2008 semester.
The Davis Center was named in honor of an alumnus who provided a generous gift to ensure the continuance of excellence in scholarship and the teaching of history at Princeton. Each year, about a half-dozen scholars are chosen to participate in the seminar and pursue research related to a particular theme.
The Center’s focus for the academic years 2008-09 and 2009-10 will be the problem of cultures and institutions in motion. Issues to be studied may include the diffusion of religious and cultural practices; the migration of technologies and objects; the circulation of ideas, traditions and aesthetic forms; the transfer of policies and legal practices; and the dynamics of traveling social movements.
The title of Pennybacker’s project is “Political exile in postwar London: the South Africans,” which is part of a book that she is writing on political exile in London after World War II. Her new project will focus on dissenting exile communities of the former British Empire and the ways in which they affected the metropolitan outlook in London in the post-war era.
Pennybacker, who has taught at Trinity since 1983, is a modern British and European specialist. She also has directed the Hartford Studies Project at Trinity since the early 1990s, and is past president of the Northeast Conference of British Studies. She has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, New York University, The City College of New York, and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.
Since its inception, the Davis Center’s primary role has been to conduct a weekly seminar in which members of the faculty, visitors from other institutions, graduate students and selected undergraduates participate. For a period of two years, the Center focuses on a specific theme or aspect of history. Emphasis is placed on interdisciplinary approaches and subjects that span different geographical areas or periods.
The new director of the Davis Center is Daniel Rodgers, who has been a member of the Princeton faculty since 1980 and whose specialty is American ideas and culture. He has written several books, held several fellowships and has been a Fulbright lecturer in Germany and Japan. He also has taught at Cambridge University and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His project was entitled, “Transformation in Social Thought in 1980s America.”