Two faculty receive National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship grants

Close-up headshots of Jennifer Lackey and Dassia Posner are shown against a light gray background.Jennifer Lackey (left) and Dassia Posner (right)

Two faculty in Weinberg College have been awarded Fellowship grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)Jennifer Lackey and Dassia Posner.

The awards are part of $28.1 million in grants provided by the NEH for 204 humanities projects across the country. Among these, NEH Fellowships are competitive awards presented to scholars whose projects “embody exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clear writing.”

Jennifer Lackey, the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy, receives this for her project, Epistemic Reparations. Her grant will support research and writing leading to a book on the rights of victims to epistemic justice by being known and heard by the parties who wronged them. Epistemic justice refers to the “[in]clusion of marginalized and oppressed people [in] 1) being heard and understood by others in interpersonal communications, and 2) contributing to broader and deeper social understandings of the human experience.”

Dassia Posner is associate professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her project is titled The Kamerny Theatre: An Artistic History in Political Times. Her grant will support research and writing leading to a book on the history of Moscow’s Kamerny Theatre, an avant-garde theater founded by Ukranian-Jewish director Alexander Tairov and dissolved during Stalin’s purges (1914-1950). The work will be an archival study of the Theatre’s innovations and international influence in the artistic and political context of the Soviet Union.

Both Lackey and Posner are past fellows of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities in Weinberg College.