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Professor Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Honor
University of Southern Mississippi Assistant Professor of History Dr. Rebecca Tuuri was recently announced as a 2016 recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) Summer Stipend. Tuuri is one of three professors in the state of Mississippi to win this prestigious honor, which places her in the 9th percentile of college professors across the United States whose submitted projects were chosen.
Tuuri’s project, “Careful Crusaders: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle,” is a book-length study of the National Council of Negro Women. Summer Stipends awarded by NEH support individuals pursuing advanced research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. Recipients usually produce articles, monographs, books, digital materials, archaeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly works.
Tuuri says winning this award shows that there is great interest in the history of African American women in mid-20th century freedom struggles, and that there is a commitment from the historical profession and the nation at large to make black women’s activism and their legacies central to the study of American history.
“This stipend will allow me to visit the Rockefeller Archive Center where I will examine the archival records of the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Taconic Foundation to show that the National Council of Negro Women used these prominent groups to help fund their poverty and training programs during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements,” Tuuri said.
She will use the remainder of the summer to complete her book manuscript, which is currently under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press. “I am deeply grateful for the research support that I have received from the faculty, administrators and staff in the Department of History, the College of Arts and Letters, and the University. Without their help none of this would have been possible,” Tuuri said.
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.
Along with Tuuri, the Department of History at Southern Miss boasts the current Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Alumni Professor of the Humanities, the 2015 Mississippi Humanities Council Humanities Teacher of the Year at Southern Miss, the General Bufford Blount Professorship in Military History, and the 2016 Humanities Scholar of the Year, also from the Mississippi Humanities Council, a University Distinguished Professor and many more esteemed faculty members whose expertise ranges from colonial America to 19th Century France to Medieval Europe to the American Civil War to 20th Century Latin America to Ming China and beyond.
“The faculty and students of the History Department are extremely proud of our colleague, Dr. Rebecca Tuuri, on her receipt of a National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Stipend,” said Dr. Kyle Zelner, chairman of the History Department. “Dr. Tuuri’s pioneering study of the roles of middle class African American women as part of the National Council of Negro Women will open up entirely new avenues of scholarly inquiry into the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.”
Zelner believes that Tuuri’s book will be of intense interest not only to scholars, but to anyone who is curious about American women’s history, African American history, civil rights, or human rights and social justice.
Dr. Maureen Ryan, interim dean of the College of Arts and Letters agrees with Zelner and went on to say “Contemporary scholars have recognized that the integral role of women in the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement is one of the untold stories of that transformational mid-twentieth century crusade.” Ryan stated that it is obvious that the National Endowment for the Humanities has noted that as well, in awarding of a prestigious research grant to Dr. Tuuri.
“This national recognition of Dr. Tuuri’s work reinforces many other acknowledgements of the Southern Miss Department of History’s cutting edge historical scholarship. The College is, of course, delighted and congratulates Dr. Tuuri,” Ryan said.
For information about the USM Department of History and Dr. Tuuri’s research and teaching, visit www.usm.edu/history.
