TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. George Williamson, assistant professor of history at The University of Alabama, recently received the James Bryant Conant Fellowship at Harvard University.
The fellowship is sponsored by the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard. The fellowship lasts 12 months, beginning July 2000. Williamson’s main responsibility will be to prepare his dissertation for publication as a book.
“The fellowship means that I will have the time and resources necessary to complete revisions to my manuscript and get it in the hands of a publisher before the end of the year,” Williamson said. “It is also an excellent opportunity to meet and interact with other scholars in the field of German and European studies. I will come back to my teaching fully refreshed and — I hope — bursting with new ideas.”
The fellowship is designed for scholars working on some aspect of modern European politics, history, society, economics or culture. Typically, two fellowships are awarded each year to non-tenured instructors or professors.
The tentative book title for Williamson’s manuscript is “The Longing for Myth in Germany: Culture, Religion, Politics, 1790-1890.”
The book examines the fascination with myth among German intellectuals from the Romantics to Nietzsche, focusing on their attempt to imagine a new mythology, which they believed would invigorate cultural and religious life in Germany and transform a disordered society into a unified whole. The study draws on a range of sources from philosophy, theology, classical philology, ethnology, and music, as well as museum displays, memoirs and popular literature. As a work of history, it attempts to link the German fascination with myth to broader problems of theological and religious conflict, the transformation of the public sphere, and the development of German nationalism in the 19th century.
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