Alumni Services

Fulbright Award recipient

University of Edinburgh alumnus, Dr Philip Kaisary, receives a prestigious Fulbright Award to the US.

Philip Kaisary

Philip Kaisary, an alumnus of the University’s Department of English Literature, has received a Fulbright Scholar Award to enable him to research at Vanderbilt University on one of the most prestigious and selective scholarship programmes operating worldwide.

Blazing a trail

As a participant, Philip Kaisary has been selected to carry out his research project on the Haitian slave revolution of 1791–1804 and the interpretative archive it generated in the antebellum United States.

Philip’s project will aim to provide a more complete critical picture of how constitutionalism, nationality, and citizenship figured in the jigsaw puzzle of Haitian, American, and Atlantic politics in this period, exploring how the birth of the world’s first black republic generated an enduring ideological inheritance and blazed a radical trail long into the 19th century Atlantic world.

I am delighted to have been selectedas a 2015–16 Fulbright Scholar. I am thoroughly looking forward to working alongside and learning from Vanderbilt’s wonderful legal and cultural historians of the Atlantic world. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been offered this opportunity to develop as a researcher and a writer while I learn more about the way in which the story of Haitian independence impacted upon the discourses of free black men and women in the 19th century United States. And, of course, I am also looking forward to a year in Nashville!”

Philip Kaisary

A special relationship

The US-UK Fulbright Commission is the only bi-lateral, transatlantic scholarship programme, offering awards for study or research in any field, at any accredited US or UK university. The Commission is part of the Fulbright programme conceived by Senator J William Fulbright in the aftermath of World War II to promote leadership, learning and empathy between nations through educational exchange.

I know our2015 cohort will do us great credit during their time in the US and beyond. Only exceptional scholars and students win Fulbright awards: one of the world’s most competitive merit-based international scholarships.

Penny EganExecutive Director, US-UK Fulbright Commission

Black history and culture

Philip Kaisary is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Warwick. He holds a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literary Studies, a Masters degree in Postcolonial Studies, and he qualified as a solicitor in 2012. Long fascinated by global black history and culture, Philip is author of The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2014.

An aficionado of the American South, and with interests in jazz, Americana, and the arts, Philip is looking forward to making the most of his year in Nashville.

Related links

US-UK Fulbright Commission

School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

Vanderbilt University