Cal State East Bay History Professor Wins Prestigious Barra Sabbatical Fellowship
Dee E. Andrews
- March 17, 2015
Cal State East Bay history professor Dee E. Andrews has won the Barra Sabbatical Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia for the 2015-16 academic year.
The nine-month fellowship, beginning Sept. 1, is awarded to a scholar of early American studies or early modern Atlantic studies. The fellowship is offered by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, an affiliate of the University of Pennsylvania, and one of only two major centers in the U.S. devoted exclusively to sustaining early American studies as a field.
Interested applicants must submit proposals for book-length projects. Andrews expects to complete her book, “Thomas Clarkson, Author, and the Age of Abolition,” which focuses on British abolitionist Clarkson’s “author-work” — his combination of activism and his career as a professional writer — and his wide antislavery network on both sides of the Atlantic.
Clarkson lived from 1760 to 1846, and was one of a rising number of activists who opposed the Atlantic slave trade on the grounds of universal human rights and opposition to racism. Andrews’ book will explore how Clarkson created a literary model that was indispensable to later abolitionist writers, especially in the United States. In the first decades of the 19th century, millions of copies of anti-slavery publications were issued, ultimately leading to the great divide of the Civil War.
As a Barra Fellow, Andrews will be encouraged to provide informal mentoring to junior members of the McNeil Center community while participating in the center’s seminars and other activities. She will receive a grant of $46,000 and additional support from CSUEB.
“I am thrilled to be named the Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center,” Andrews said. “It will give me a year to complete a project I have been researching for 10 years. I’ll likely have the opportunity do several public lectures highlighting Clarkson’s correspondence with important writers from the Romantic period, his use of major graphical images in his books — including the notorious image of the conditions on a slave ship — his printer’s and publisher’s account books, and other rare materials that reveal how he used writing to further the abolitionist cause. Many of these sources have not been used by historians before or were even known to exist.”
Kathleen Rountree, dean of the College of Letters Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) at CSUEB, said, “I am delighted to see the work of Professor Andrews recognized by this prestigious fellowship. This award highlights the talents of our humanities faculty in CLASS and shows that our faculty often works on major projects that take many years of accumulated effort to come to fruition.
“I’m especially pleased that Professor Andrews’s scholarship focuses on an aspect of American history — the history of social and racial justice — that is so important to our students and CSUEB’s mission,” Rountree continued. “I am confident this support will enable her exciting work to reach completion, and will simultaneously open new ideas for inquiry in the future.”
Andrews earned a B.A. in social sciences from Bennington College, and master’s and doctorate degrees in history from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been teaching American history and historical methods at CSUEB since fall 1987.
Her first book, “The Methodists and Revolutionary America,” which also had substantial new material on the origins of antislavery, won the 2001 Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
“I have always found that CSUEB students are fascinated by the history of slavery and antislavery, and are often surprised both by how far back — all the way to the 1760s at least — that the origins of antislavery can be traced, and yet how difficult it was to get rid of this terrible institution, not only in the U.S. but all through the Atlantic world,” Andrews said. “Clarkson is a major hero in this regard, and the study of his work has been a deeply inspiring experience for me.”