Trio of Grants Awarded to Nancy Gallman

Assistant Professor of History Nancy O. Gallman has been named a 2022 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellow for her book project, Law’s Borderlands: Life, Liberty, and Property in an Old American South.

Prof. Gallman’s ACLS fellowship award will support twelve months of full-time research and writing during her upcoming 2022-23 sabbatical leave. Law’s Borderlands is the first book to examine the cross-cultural legal history of late colonial Florida. In this manuscript, Prof. Gallman analyzes Spanish legal records, correspondence between Seminole and Lower Creek leaders and colonial officials, and other primary source materials to reconstruct the complex legal world of the Florida borderlands at the turn of the nineteenth century. Her research uncovers how Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and people of African descent mutually created a cosmopolitan legal order in this contested region, bolstering alliances that blocked U.S. expansion into Florida after the American Revolution. As Prof. Gallman writes, “this project deepens our understanding of the plural dimensions of law in the making of the American South and in our nation’s founding and development.”

The ACLS fellowship program “supports exceptional scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences that has the potential to make significant contributions within and beyond their fields.” This year, the program received nearly 1,000 applicants and awarded just 60 fellowships through a rigorous, multi-stage peer review process. Read the ACLS announcement here.

In addition, Prof. Gallman has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The NEH Summer Stipends program supports continuous full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two consecutive months. Each year this program invites nominations from colleges and universities across the U.S.; up to two nominees from each institution may apply. Even with this vetting process, these awards are also hard to land: the funding rate is just 14% this year. Prof. Gallman joins a prestigious group of Lewis & Clark faculty members who have previously been awarded NEH Summer Stipends—including three from the history department!

Finally, the American Philosophical Society has awarded Prof. Gallman a Franklin Research Grant. This grant program is designed to help meet the costs of travel for research purposes. Prof. Gallman will use these funds to spend the summer before her sabbatical conducting research at archives in Florida.

April 2022