Five Faculty Members Win Whiting Foundation Grants

The College has awarded grants from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to five faculty members for the 2004-05 academic year.

The recipient of a Whiting Teaching Fellowship for the full academic year is Katherine L. Elkins, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of IPHS. Elkins, who joined the Kenyon faculty in 2002, plans to expand her doctoral dissertation, "Beyond the Archive: Rewriting Memory in Baudelaire, Proust, and Beckett."

Whiting Research Grants were awarded to Sarah Blick, assistant professor of art history, and Henry Spiller, the Luce Assistant Professor in Asian Music and Culture.

Blick, who received a Whiting Summer Stipend in 2002 to pursue her study of St. Thomas Becket, will use the new grant to continue that research as well as to produce an online version of the scholarly journal Peregrinations, which she co-founded and co-edits. Blick has taught at the College since 1994.

Spiller, an ethnomusicologist, will travel to New York City and a number of cities in the Netherlands to research Western artists who studied Indonesian music in the first decades of the twentieth century and incorporated Indonesian materials into their works. Spiller joined the faculty in 2002.

Theodore E. Buehrer, assistant professor of music, and Matthew Maguire, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History and IPHS, received Whiting Summer Stipends.

Buehrer, who also won a Whiting Teaching Fellowship in 2002, plans to continue his research on jazz musician Mary Lou Williams and will be preparing a book proposal for the Music of the United States of America (MUSA) series of critical editions published by A-R Editions in conjunction with the American Musicological Society.

Maguire, who came to Kenyon in 2002, plans to conduct research on European intellectual history, in particular the relationship between modernism and Christianity in France.

The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, based in New York, supports the humanities and creative writing. Kenyon professors have received fellowships and grants from the foundation under a program established in 2001 to help advance the careers of outstanding junior faculty members.