University of Arkansas Historian Wins N.E.H. Summer Research Grant

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Professor Andrea Arrington of the department of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences has just won a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. The N.E.H. Summer Stipend will support Arrington's final touches on her book manuscript, Turning Water into Gold: The Commercialization of Victoria Falls, 1880-2008.

In the book, Arrington focuses on the tourist trade in Victoria Falls, Zambia and the borderlands between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Arrington‘s manuscript is impressive in terms of its significance to key topics of imperialism, colonialism and gender. Her work takes her into issues of memories of colonial rule in southern Africa, the gendered division of labor, and the competing tourist industries of Zambian and Zimbabwean sides of the water falls (a fascinating study in its own right, as the two sites go back and forth between ‘boom town‘ and ‘ghost town‘).

Arrington‘s research joins a small circle of studies on African tourism, but, as she makes clear in her N.E.H. proposal, hers is the first to consider the transformation of a tourist site from the age of colonial rule in the nineteenth century up to the present-day.