History Doctoral Student Wins Major National Fellowship

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Elizabeth Kiszonas

History doctoral candidate Elizabeth Kiszonas has been named a Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2018-19 academic year.

The McNeil Center is the preeminent scholarly center for the study of early American history. At the McNeil Center, Kiszonas will interact with leading historians of early American history, participate in reading and writing seminars, and have access to numerous archival collections in and around Philadelphia while she completes her dissertation. The fellowship comes with a stipend of $25,000.

Kiszonas' dissertation, "Westward the Course of Empire: George Berkeley's Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts in American Art and Cultural History," explores the long reach of a single line of poetry, "Westward the course of empire takes its way." Composed in 1726 by the philosopher George Berkeley, the words colonized an enormous swath of cultural landscape over nearly two centuries of American history, evolving from an old-world vision of prophetic empire into a nationalist slogan of manifest destiny. Following the poem as it threads through popular literary and visual culture, Kiszonas' project demonstrates how this simple sentence acclimated Americans to an expansive conception of United States Empire from the colonial period through Reconstruction.

"This fellowship solidifies Liz as one of the top up and coming early American historians," said Jim Gigantino, associate professor of history and Kiszonas' dissertation adviser. "She has already demonstrated her excellence in the classroom here on campus and her dissertation is poised to make an original and insightful contribution to how Americans understand expansionism in the early national and antebellum periods." 

Kiszonas was a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow and is the recipient of the J. Hillman Yowell Award for Excellence in Teaching from the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and the James J. Hudson Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities along with numerous other awards and prizes from the history department.