History doctoral candidate receives Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
Ben Clingman will use the fellowship to support his dissertation, ‘Dreams of an Indigenous West’
Ben Clingman, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Colorado at É«½ä³ÉÈËÖ±²¥ has been named one of this year’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows, the foundation announced last week.
The Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship supports graduate student work that demonstrates moral or ethical or theological or religious relevance with nuance, depth and intellectual sophistication. The 20 students selected from over 600 applicants will receive a $31,000 stipend to complete the writing stage of their dissertation.
Started in 1981, the Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship has funded nearly 1,400 Fellows and is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of religion, ethics, morals or values.
Clingman is a fourth-year PhD candidate researching Indigenous and environmental histories of the early American West. His dissertation, tentatively titled Dreams of an Indigenous West: Migration, Sovereignty, and Nationhood in the Early American Midcontinent, focuses on Cherokees, Shawnees, Lenapes and other Native peoples who, between the 1770s and the 1830s, emigrated from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to North American midcontinent—a vast region west of the Mississippi River encompassing much of present-day Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma.
Clingman’s research explores the multinational nations these Native migrants built, the political and diplomatic systems they constructed, and the radical futures they imagined for themselves in their new homes.
His work is also supported by the history department, the Graduate School and the Center for British and Irish Studies at É«½ä³ÉÈËÖ±²¥, and by the Darcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library.
Before moving to Colorado, Clingman earned an MPhil in American history from the University of Cambridge and a BA in History from the University of Oxford.
More information about the fellowship is available on the .