Second Fulbright Student Wins Hudson Award

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Nathaniel Conley

Graduate student Nathaniel Conley has won a James J. Hudson Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities for the 2017-18 academic year. Conley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and is also pursuing a graduate certificate in African and African American Studies.

The Hudson Fellowship is awarded to outstanding doctoral candidates who have completed their coursework and are working on dissertations in comparative literature, English, history or philosophy. The fellowship, which comes with a cash prize of $1,500, was established in 1986 in memory of James J. Hudson, a longtime professor of history and former dean of the University of Arkansas Graduate School.

Conley's dissertation is a study of freedom and unfreedom along the Mason-Dixon Line in the Appalachian regions of Maryland and Pennsylvania. He argues that unfree labor was important to the social, economic and political development of the region during the early American republic period. As part of his research, he closely examines the role of African Americans in the region's labor force and the supposed destruction of slavery in Pennsylvania, an understudied phenomenon in that locale.

The fellowship will help Conley fund a final archival research trip this summer to several archives in Pennsylvania and Maryland, in order to complete his dissertation next year.