Catherine Gunther Kodat, associate professor of English and American Studies at Hamilton College, has been awarded a Millicent C. McIntosh Flexible Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The fellowships are awarded to especially promising, recently tenured faculty members in the humanities at liberal arts colleges. Kodat is one of three recipients.
The program, in its pilot year, recognizes that many newly tenured professors have family and community obligations that prevent them from accepting major fellowships that require residency away from their home institutions. Therefore these fellowships allow faculty to formulate a program of research that does not require long absences from home. The award carries a stipend of $15,000 to which home institutions are expected to contribute another $5,000 in addition to salary and benefits.
The grant will enable Kodat to complete her book, "Don't Act:" The Cold War Politics of Art, an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between federal arts policies and cultural production in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. The book will examine how the current controversies over federal arts funding are tied to the United States' "victory" in the Cold War, a victory that has unexpectedly exposed the historical limitations of conventional U.S. justifications for government support of the arts. Don't Act explores the importance of Cold War cultural diplomacy (starting with the "goodwill tours" undertaken during the Eisenhower administration) to the emergence of systematic federal arts funding.
Kodat earned a Ph.D. and masters' degree in English from Boston University, and a bachelor's degree from the University of Baltimore. She has written numerous book reviews and articles for such publications as Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Twentieth Century Literature and The Southern Quarterly. Before joining the Hamilton College faculty she was a reporter and dance critic for The Baltimore Sun and correspondent for Dance Magazine.
The McIntosh Fellowships are named in honor of Millicent C. McIntosh, the late president of Barnard College, a noted humanist and educator, and are supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Millicent McIntosh served as a trustee of Kirkland College and received an honorary degree from Hamilton College.
