Kacie Harris and Ethan Key Win Fulbright Study/Research Awards
The Department of History congratulates PhD Candidates Kacie Harris and Ethan Key on winning Fulbright awards to aid them in conducting research for each of their dissertations:
Kacie Harris
I was granted a Fulbright Study/Research award for my dissertation “Nietzsche’s Afterlife: Truth and Myth-making in Twentieth-Century Discourse.” Beginning in January, I will be a visiting researcher at the University of Freiburg in southwest Germany, where I’ll participate in a graduate seminar at the Center for Modern and Contemporary History under the direction of its chair, Professor Jan Eckel. While on the Fulbright, I plan to wrap up my archival research and finish drafting my dissertation. I’m thrilled to have this time to devote to the dissertation and learn from colleagues abroad. More than that, I remain incredibly grateful for the support from the faculty and staff in BU’s history department, especially to my advisor Jonathan Zatlin, Charles Dellheim, and Alexis Peri for their help with the project.
Ethan Key
This project is a study in how people dealt with their incorporation into the Ethiopian Empire and shaped its foundation as a multicultural nation-state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I assert that the people who were most capable of crossing river systems that divided languages, cultures, and provinces ended up as models who set the terms for ongoing negotiations about how the new periphery would relate to the central government. I therefore look at the lives of traders, religious teachers, and soldiers as people who – in very different ways – not only crossed rivers and mountains as physical barriers, but they also crossed conceptual boundaries between languages, faiths, and cultures. My project began with the life and legacy of Onesimos Nasib (https://dacb.org/stories/ethiopia/onesimus-nesib/), who had been enslaved as a child, translated the Bible into the Oromo language (1899), and then returned home to the “semi-autonomous” province of Wallaga as a teacher (1904-1931). As I learned more about his life story, in addition to how exceptional he was, I realized that he was not alone in providing examples for ordinary people to recognize their places in a rapidly changing world and learn to communicate across cultures, languages, and worldviews. Fulbright-Hays funds will provide me the opportunity to connect documentary evidence from the 1850s to the 1930s, interviews conducted by other scholars in the 1970s, and my own interviews from the present, giving me an overview of how these historical figures’ actions continue to resonate in different ways across generations.