Jane Dailey, a professor in the history department of Johns Hopkins University, has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for her contributions to the study of United States history.
The fellowships are awarded "on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. She is one of 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected from a pool of more than 3200 applicants.
The full list of recipients can be found online and was also printed in an issue of the New York Times.
Dailey specializes in the history of the Southern United States and African-American history.
She is currently working on a book about racial politics in the 20th century. The proposal for this project is what was submitted to the Guggenheim committee.
"You have to have a pretty well-defined project and proposal," said Dailey.
"[This award] gives you support for research and writing, so you don't have to teach, and [so that] you can go wherever you need to."
Her travels have taken her to place like Jackson, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, both active areas for the civil rights movement.
Dailey applied for several other awards with this proposal and received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies. She was also named a Prize Fellow at the American Academy of Berlin.
She will not be taking the Guggenheim grant for another two years. "Often you can't take [several] grants at the same time, so the Guggenheim is nice because you put it in the bank," Dailey said.
"I'm delighted and astonished," she added. "[The Guggenheim] is more or less the gold standard for grants, not only because of the money, but because it tries to advertise [that] so many [of its recipients] are not affiliated with institutions... and [it recognizes] a wide range [of fields], from dancers to physicists."
"These independent grants are especially important now, because the National Endowment of Humanities (NEH) has become re-politicized," she said, even as the NEH has seen an increase in funding.
Dailey mentioned an article in a January issue of the Chronicle for Higher Education that discussed the practice of "flagging' proposals dealing with race, sex and other highly controversial political topics, especially in United States history.
"You'll see how careful people are being in the article.... [Flagging] was especially prominent when Lynn Cheney was running the NEH during the Reagan administration," Dailey said.
"[This is happening] on a worse scale now," as similar "politically motivated interference" is being employed at the National Institutes of Health for health issues dealing with sexuality and similarly controversial topics.
"It is important to have lots of funding sources... without government oversight, like the Guggenheim and the American Council of Learned Societies, because they aren't becoming re-politicized," Dailey said.
Dailey grew up in northern California and attended public schools. In 1987, she received an A.B. from Yale University in history, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1995.
She taught at Rice University in Houston for six years, which she said she enjoyed immensely.
"It's a great undergraduate university," Dailey said. She has been at Hopkins for three years and was involved in the creation of the Africana Studies program.
"Africana is an all-inclusive term... it relates to a world of knowledge. It includes ideas and people that originated in Africa, and it makes [the field of study] as wide as possible."
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