U.Va.'s Governing America in a Global Era Program Funds Its 90th Fellow; Publishing Agreement with Cornell University Press Approved

June 23, 2009 — Eight fellows were chosen this year from 185 applicants for the Governing America in a Global Era program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Initiated in 2000, the fellowship provides financial support to students who are completing their dissertation in fields that use history to shed light on contemporary U.S. domestic and foreign policies and politics. With this year's class, the GAGE program has named 90 fellows.

The GAGE program is perhaps best known for its "Dream Mentor" feature. Each year, director Brian Balogh works with GAGE associates and the fellows to identify ideal faculty advisers who can best aid fellows in their research pursuits. Mentors are drawn from leading political science, history and sociology departments around the world, and have included luminaries ranging from University of Pennsylvania historian Tom Sugrue to Yale political scientist David Mayhew

The GAGE program's most distinctive mission is to make new scholarship more accessible to the general public and to make political scientists and historians active participants in open debates about public policy. The program provides training sessions with senior scholars who have also published hundreds of op-eds and who appear on radio and television regularly.

Former fellow and Emory University associate professor Joe Crespino, for example, published an opinion piece in the New York Times that explored "The Way Republicans Talk About Race." He completed the op-ed during his GAGE fellowship year. The op-ed grew directly out of Crespino's history dissertation at Stanford University, and the dissertation led to his prize-winning book: "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution" (Princeton University Press, 2007).

The 2009-10 GAGE roster:

• Lily Geismer, a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan
• Eric Lomazoff, a government Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University
• Gwendoline Alphonso, a government and U.S. politics Ph.D. candidate at Cornell
• Christy Chapin, a history Ph.D. candidate at U.Va.
• Brendan Green, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political science Ph.D. candidate
• Zane Kelly, political science Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado
• Aaron Rapport, political science Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota
• Vanessa Walker, a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.


For information about current and past GAGE fellows and mentors, visit here.

Cornell University Press has just agreed to a cooperative arrangement with the Miller Center to publish and promote future GAGE scholarship.

"Every press is looking for authors who can make a contribution to the field and add their voices to public debate," said Michael McGandy, acquisitions editor with Cornell University Press. "The Miller Center is a place where scholarship meets with citizenship. We expect that some very important and influential books will be published through our cooperation with the center and its scholars.'

About the Miller Center of Public Affairs

Founded in 1975, the Miller Center is a leading nonpartisan public policy institution that aims to fulfill Thomas Jefferson's public service mission by serving as a national meeting place for engaged citizens, scholars, students, media representatives and government officials to research, reflect and report on issues of national importance to the governance of the United States, with special attention to the central role and history of the presidency.