Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies and History Anelise Hanson Shrout<\/a> will use her expertise in digital humanities to explore the \u201cBellevue Establishment,\u201d the collective name for New York City\u2019s public health institutions in the 19th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Associate Professor of Sociology Marcelle Medford<\/a> will explore how Caribbean immigrants use reggae and cricket to recreate cultural belonging in the U.S., tracing how these symbols of national identity have evolved in social and political significance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A competitive, proposal-based program, the college\u2019s Phillips Fellowships provide funding for a year-long sabbatical at full salary, plus a $4,000 stipend for travel and research expenses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fellowships are funded by the Phillips Endowment Program, an initiative of awards, honors, and opportunities for Bates faculty and students funded by a $9 million endowment bequest made to the college in 1999 by Charles F. Phillips, the fourth president of Bates, and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPhillips Fellowships play a pivotal role in supporting the high aspirations of our faculty,\u201d said Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. \u201cThey support transformative research while contributing groundbreaking insights in their fields. These fellowships are an investment in intellectual exploration, the expansion of knowledge, and the enrichment of their teaching, ultimately benefiting our entire community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wesley Chaney<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Chaney will work on his ongoing book project, \u201cTurnip Fields and Noodle Wars,\u201d exploring the history of agriculture and foodways in northwestern China as a way to understand current China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A historian of China who concentrates on the environmental, social, and legal history of the Qing Empire (1644\u20131912), Chaney has conducted extensive archival research, looking at everything from capital crime cases and land disputes to oral histories, newspaper and journal articles, and memoirs, and done field visits to Beijing, Lanzhou, and Xining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A historian of China who concentrates on the environmental, social, and legal history of the Qing Empire (1644\u20131912), Chaney has conducted extensive archival research, looking at everything from capital crime cases and land disputes to oral histories, newspaper and journal articles, and memoirs, and done field visits to Beijing, Lanzhou, and Xining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chaney tells the story of Zeng Fanyang, who accidentally pulled his neighbor\u2019s winter turnips (manjing) one day in the summer of 1768, \u201cresulting in a fight that led to his death and a legal case that made its way to the imperial capital,\u201d he explains. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Such a story, plus along with other tales related to highland barley, sheep, naked carp, angelica, and noodles, underscores how \u201cfood production and culinary practices intersected with transformations in the family, village communities, and human\u2013non-human relations over the watershed moments of the last three centuries,\u201d says Chaney, who is a member of the college\u2019s Program in Asian Studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTelling the local history of the mountainous northwest, from its fields to its hearths, offers new perspectives on contestations over the meanings of modernity. What people grow and what people eat reveal the tensions at the heart of contemporary China.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anelise Hanson Shrout<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Shrout will use her expertise in the digital humanities to better understand the history of U.S. immigrants who were incarcerated in the \u201cBellevue Establishment,\u201d the collective name for New York City\u2019s public health institutions in the 19th century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She will compile her research into a three-component project entitled \u201cBellevue: Medicine, Immigration and Incarceration.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBellevue was a place for people who \u2018misfit\u2019 elite New Yorkers\u2019 expectations,\u201d explains Shrout, such as the sick, mentally ill, poor, and new to America. \u201cPeople born outside of the U.S. were sent to Bellevue, often against their will, by the thousands. In New York City\u2019s foundational public hospital, immigration status was literally rendered into illness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She plans to partner with the New York Department of Records and Information Services to develop a publicly accessible digital archive that serves as an educational resource on inmates\u2019 lives at Bellevue. In addition, Shrout will develop an open-access toolkit to help researchers use and analyze information from the archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She will also write a monograph, presenting information about historical incarcerations, and explaining how incarcerated immigrants shaped medical, carceral, and immigration control systems in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Shrout, who is a member of the college\u2019s Program in American Studies, the project \u201ccontinues my interest in how archives and data produced by people in dominant positions tell the stories of people denied access to social and political power.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marcelle Medford<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Medford, an expert in Black immigrants\u2019 understanding of their own ethnically-specific identities in the U.S., will complete a book manuscript exploring how Caribbean immigrants to the U.S. have tried to recreate a sense of cultural belonging by drawing on two powerful expressions of Caribbean identity: reggae and cricket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To study the culture of cricket, Medford will attend matches at historic Queen\u2019s Park Oval in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, an iconic venue and one of the largest (capacity 18,000) cricket stadiums in the Caribbean. She will also analyze archival attendance records, starting from the decade prior to Trinidad\u2019s 1962 independence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy working hypothesis is that Caribbean immigrants are struggling to replenish cricket culture in the U.S. because it has waned in popularity and political significance back home,\u201d says Medford, who is a member of the college\u2019s Program in Africana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To study the intersection of reggae and immigrant identity, Medford will visit the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica and attend the annual Bob Marley week in February 2026 and the Annual Bob Marley Lecture at the Institute for Caribbean Studies at the University of West Indies in Mona, Jamaica.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cReggae is now part and parcel of Jamaica\u2019s lucrative tourist industry,\u201d says Medford. But prior to Marley\u2019s ascendancy, the Jamaican government had banned some reggae music from the radio. \u201cMy research is concerned with how the state embrace of a once-shunned subculture shapes the nationalist sensibilities of immigrants from the region.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three Bates professors were awarded Phillips Fellowships for 2024\u201325.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Associate Professor of Biology Andrew Mountcastle<\/a>, whose area of study is wing collisions between insects and flowers, is working on an audio-visual sensor capable of capturing audio data of pollinators visiting flowers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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