The fellowships, open to all tenured and tenure-track faculty in Arts & Sciences, are designed to provide both a physical and intellectual environment for innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching.

Recipients will spend a semester in residence with the center, researching new projects while also attending a variety of presentations and events and delivering a formal, public lecture about their work.

The first three recipients are: Erin McGlothlin, Ph.D., assistant professor of Germanic languages & literatures; Peter Kastor, Ph.D., assistant professor of history; and Harriet Stone, Ph.D., professor of romance languages.

McGlothlin's project, titled "Restoring the Story: Fiction and History in Contemporary Jewish Holocaust Literature," will investigate how contemporary Jewish writers have dealt with the memory of the Holocaust through a diverse body of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Kastor's "An Accurate Empire: Rendering America, 1776-1830" will examine how Americans described, depicted, governed and — in the end — understood the continent of North America during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Stone's "Objects for the Table: The Art of Science in Early Modern Europe" will employ Dutch genre painting to illustrate how the artistic ordering of pictorial space relates to the scientific practice of assembling specimens and organizing data.

Also selected was Gerald Izenberg, Ph.D., professor of history, who will be in residence in spring 2007.

The center is accepting applications for the 2006-07 academic year. The deadline is Sept. 30, with winners to be announced in De-cember.

For more information, go online to cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu or contact Jian Leng, Ph.D., associate director of the center, at 935-4008 or cenhum@artsci.wustl.edu.