History doctoral candidate receives Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

Ben Clingman, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder has been named one of this year’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows, the foundation announced last week. 

The Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship supports graduate student work that demonstrates moral or ethical or theological or religious relevance with nuance, depth and intellectual sophistication. The 20 students selected from over 600 applicants will receive a $31,000 stipend to complete the writing stage of their dissertation.

Started in 1981, the Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship has funded nearly 1,400 Fellows and is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of religion, ethics, morals or values.

Clingman is a fourth-year PhD candidate researching Indigenous and environmental histories of the early American West. His dissertation, tentatively titled Dreams of an Indigenous West: Migration, Sovereignty, and Nationhood in the Early American Midcontinent, focuses on Cherokees, Shawnees, Lenapes and other Native peoples who, between the 1770s and the 1830s, emigrated from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to North American midcontinent—a vast region west of the Mississippi River encompassing much of present-day Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. Read More