Two Fulbright College Faculty Win Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Two faculty members in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences have won 2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, which will enable them to complete research projects, one on segregationist propaganda and the other on triptychs, or paintings with doors, art works that were immensely popular during the 15^th and 16^th centuries.

Art department chair Lynn Jacobs and associate history professor David Chappell were two of the 155 faculty nationwide who won fellowships, selected from a field of 1,395 applicants. Jacobs plans to use her $40,000 award to support research and travel to European museums to view triptychs produced by Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch and other Flemish painters.

“These are prestigious awards that are difficult to win. For two of our faculty to have done so is quite an honor and a testament to the importance and quality of their research,” said Donald Bobbitt, dean of Fulbright College.

Chappell, who earned broad critical acclaim for his 2004 book, “A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow,” will use the support to finish a book on a subject he has studied for seven years: the various ways post-World War II segregationists in the South sought to strengthen a system of racial domination and how they failed, despite overwhelming support from the white majority in the region.

Jacobs plans to complete a book as well, titled “Opening Doors: the Early Netherlandish Triptych Reinterpreted.” A triptych, often religious in theme, consists of three painted wooden panels with hinges. Jacobs is able to bring her knowledge of art history to the visual and thematic qualities of these art works, in the process analyzing what is happening within the frames as well as between them.

“These thresholds form boundaries between different levels of reality, different times and spaces, and ultimately, between different worlds,” Jacobs said. “In Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for example, he uses miraculous thresholds to straddle dual interpretations of creation, the Augustinian view of creation in an instant as opposed to the scriptural account of creation over the course of days.”

This book emerged out of Jacobs’ first work, “Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing,” also funded by an NEH Fellowship in 1992.

Chappell began developing the groundwork of his latest book from earlier research on the civil rights movement and segregationists. He learned that segregationists were not always crude demagogues or transparent opportunists, but often made cogent and well-founded constitutional claims.

“They pointed out that the Congress that wrote the 14^th amendment guaranteeing equal protection also endorsed segregation of the District of Columbia schools and that many Northern states practiced segregation at the time they ratified the amendment,” said Chappell.

Chappell found that segregationist leaders sought and attained more respectability among educated Southerners - including a few black ones - than people today like to admit. They also garnered considerable Northern support, but segregationists ultimately underestimated the civil rights groups they opposed, oftentimes assuming that black Southerners were either contented with inferior status or incapable of effectively organizing.

“In order to fight integration effectively, segregationists would have to abandon their assumption that black people were inferior. To preserve a racist system, that is, they would have to drop a lot of their racism,” Chappell said.

His first book, “Inside Agitators,” won the Gustavus Myers Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America. His second, “A Stone of Hope,” was named a 2005 Outstanding Book on Religion by the Associated Press.