Dr. Florence W. Dore, an associate professor in the Department of English at Kent State University, has been named a National Humanities Center Fellow for the 2008-09 academic year. The honor recognizes Dore as one of 42 leading humanities scholars, chosen from a field of more than 400 applicants, who will spend a year at the center working on a substantial, individual research project and sharing ideas in seminars, lectures and conferences.

Dore will work on her second book, titled Not Knowing: Racial Equality and Forms of Privacy in Southern Modernism. In it, she explores the influence of racial desegregation on American privacy law and Southern novels written between 1890 and 1952. More specifically, she examines the way in which Southern novelists created an aesthetic of uncertainty at the very moment they began to represent racially-mixed social worlds.

The newly appointed fellows constitute the 31st class of resident scholars to be admitted since the National Humanities Center opened in 1978. They come to the center from the faculties of 25 colleges and universities in 17 states and also from eight institutions in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

“The center provides a forum for discussing excellent new work in the humanities, and fellows will all have the benefit of each others’ research to improve our own,” Dore says. “I am honored, certainly, to have been awarded one of these fellowships. But more than that, I am thrilled that I will have the opportunity to expand my scholarship, to make my book better and to be a part of this exciting intellectual community.”

Dore came to Kent State in 1999 from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2005, she published her first book, The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism, which combines close readings with gender theory, psychoanalysis and legal history. Her areas of interest include 20th century American literature, Southern literature, feminist and gender theory, law and the works of authors William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Wesleyan University and a doctorate in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

The National Humanities Center awards more than $1.6 million in individual fellowship grants that enable scholars to take leave from their normal academic duties to pursue research at the center, located in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina. Since 1978, work by scholars at the center has resulted in the publication of more than 1,000 books in all fields of humanistic study.

“Intellectual community is always enhanced by contributions from outside,” Dore says. “I expect to return to Kent State having been exposed to new ideas and to import them into the department and the university at large. I definitely expect to see this happen in my classes. I’ve always felt that students can hardly be expected to get excited about their work if their teachers aren’t. Having been a fellow at the National Humanities Center, I am sure I will be more excited about my scholarship than ever.”

Funding for the fellowship grants is made possible by the National Humanities Center’s endowment, grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, the Research Triangle Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as by contributions from alumni and friends of the center.

For more information about the National Humanities Center, visit its Web site at http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org.

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