Postgraduate Students

Dr Jacob Blanc receives NEH Fellowship

The School of History, Classics and Archaeology is delighted to share that Dr Jacob Blanc has been awarded a 2020 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

HCA Jacob Blanc
Dr Jacob Blanc

Dr Jacob Blanc, Lecturer in Latin American History, has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), one of the most prestigious awards in the North American academy. The fellowship, which is administered by the US government and is available to any US citizen, provides $60,000 over a 12-month period and is open to all disciplines in the humanities. Dr Blanc was one of 80 fellowship recipients, out of 1,200 applicants, and he is one of only two awardees working overseas.

‘It is a tremendous honour to win a fellowship from the NEH,’ Dr Blanc said. ‘Especially as an American working in the UK, at a time when we’re seeing an increase in the number of US academics coming across, it means a lot to have this recognition across three continents: support from the US government, from my home institution at Edinburgh, and for research on Latin America.’

Dr Blanc will use the NEH fellowship to advance his new project on the Prestes Column rebellion in Brazil and the spatial contours of national mythologies. Having written his first book on the rural experience of Brazil’s dictatorship — spanning the 1960s through the 1980s — the new project now looks further back, to a seminal event in the 1920s, to understand how questions of modernity and national identity were shaped by perceptions of Brazil’s vast interior regions. The project aims to deconstruct the long-standing tropes between the supposedly ‘backwards’ interior and the ‘modern’ coast. Dr Blanc’s work on the Prestes Column is part of a larger endeavour to help establish ‘interior history’ as a new subfield, applicable across Latin American history and also for any nations with socially constructed regional divides.

The School sends its warmest congratulations to Jacob.

 

Dr Blanc's staff profile

Dissertation prize for Jacob Blanc