We are happy to announce that ACOR received a National Endowment for the Humanities “Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions” grant in March 2017. The grant of $30,200 provides six months of fellowship funding for the upcoming 2018–2019 grant cycle, and is intended to promote critical scholarship in the humanities related to Jordan and the Middle East.
This summer, as part of its previous NEH award, ACOR will also host two NEH Fellows, Dr. Geoffrey Hughes and Dr. Gary Rollefson. We look forward to being a part of their contribution to the scholarly community in Jordan.
Dr. Geoffrey Hughes, a teaching fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, will be in Jordan for four months from May 2017 pursuing his project entitled “Nation and Agnation: Kinship, Conflict, and Social Control in Contemporary Jordan.”
Dr. Hughes’s research will investigate how agnation (the principle of common genealogical descent via shared male ancestors) shapes how Jordanians conceptualize and manage conflicts over inequality, social difference, and social hierarchy. He has previously done research into the role of tribalism in informal dispute resolution mechanisms in Jordan.
Dr. Gary Rollefson, professor emeritus of Anthropology at Whitman College, will be in Jordan for six months from May 2017 pursuing a project titled “Lithic Technologies and Social Identities: A Comparative Analysis of Chipped Stone Tool Production in Jordan’s Badia.”
During his fellowship, Dr. Rollefson will be engaged in a technological analysis of samples from a very large assemblage of newly excavated sites (2011‐2016) in the Black Desert, as well as from the large farming village of ‘Ain Ghazal. Dr. Rollefson has been working in Jordan for much of his career and has previously been awarded multiple NEH and CAORC fellowships at ACOR.
The NEH “Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions” award supports qualified centers and institutions to offer NEH fellowships in the humanities. Scholars can pursue their research while benefiting from the center’s special resources or its location abroad and the collegial association with other fellows. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
