Two distinguished University of Texas at Dallas scholars recently earned prestigious awards to support their continued research in the humanities.
Dr. Rosemary Admiral and Dr. Katherine Davies – both faculty members at the UT Dallas School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (AHT) – have been awarded academic funding opportunities from nationally-recognized institutions, enabling them to further their scholarly pursuits during the upcoming school year.
Admiral, assistant professor of history, earned a grant from the Fulbright Program to travel to Morocco and research the educational achievements of women in premodern North Africa.
“I think there is a stereotype for Muslim women that they don’t have access to educational opportunities and that only in modern history were they given access to education,” Admiral said. “The women from the precolonial period that I started researching specialized in religious sciences, and law in particular. Later, I found more and more women who studied other subjects, such as sciences, medicine, and poetry.”
Davies, assistant professor of philosophy and gender studies, earned a residential fellowship from The National Humanities Center (NHC) to study the U.S. foster care system from a philosophical approach.
“It’s wonderful to be recognized in this way,” Davies said. “But even more significant is that the topic itself has been recognized. The voices of foster care recipients are missing from most of the conversations that happen about them and that’s something I want to change by bringing philosophical approaches to bear on this body of scholarship.”
Admiral has served UT Dallas since 2018 and specializes in pre-modern Middle East history. Among the courses she teaches are Middle Eastern Women’s History, Middle East Civilizations, Islamic Law & Society, the Medieval Islamic World and Historical Methods, and graduate courses.
She’s a recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for 2023-2024; a competitive fellowship – offered by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) – that provides unique opportunities for scholars to teach and conduct research abroad. Admiral’s Fulbright Scholar grant will fund a research project in Rabat, Morocco (as well as other archives in the country) to explore the lives and worlds of learned women in premodern Morocco and make their intellectual world visible.
“This research contributes to the fields of Middle Eastern and North African history, legal history, Islamic studies, and histories of women and gender,” Admiral states on her proposal. “It redirects attention to an important area of the Middle East that receives relatively little attention in English-language scholarship. It intervenes in debates about women’s scholarship in North Africa in a modern context. It adds to the scarce literature on women’s recognition as legal scholars in the Islamic world.”
Admiral aims to write a book and articles that provide a foundational overview and an extensive bibliography of Muslim women’s learning and authority in a pre-modern historical context.
“I minored in Spanish while doing my bachelor’s in computer science at NYU, and had an opportunity to study abroad in Spain, and seeing the remains of Islamic Culture in Spain is what initially inspired an interest in Islamic History,” Admiral said. “This year, I will take UT Dallas students to Morocco in May. The only way I was able to study abroad was by funding it through scholarships, and I am so grateful to see the University’s support to make this opportunity accessible to UTD students from all backgrounds.”
Davies is one of 35 scholars selected from 541 applicants to join the NHC’s 2023-24 fellowship cohort. With more than $1.5 million in fellowship grants, the NHC enables scholars to take leave from their regular academic responsibilities and conduct research in residence. As part of the program, NHC fellows pursue individual scholarly research projects leading to significant publications while actively participating in seminars, lectures, and conferences to share their ideas.
Davies will pursue research on her second book, tentatively entitled “Care as Custody: A Critical Feminist Phenomenology of the U.S. Foster Care System,” at the NHC, located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for a full academic year.
At UT Dallas, Davies teaches courses in continental philosophy and feminist philosophy, including classes such as phenomenology, confronting death, medical ethics, and feminist and queer theory. In her book project, Davies will use two philosophical methodologies – feminist theory and critical phenomenology – to focus on the lived experience of surviving the foster care system.
“These approaches will allow me to elucidate that lived experience for those who may not share it,” Davies said. “In this book, I’m thinking about the experience of being in foster care, including which communities experience family separations at higher rates such as asylum seekers, native communities, and families of color, and the traumatic impacts of being taken into care and then remaining in care for an unspecified and flexible period of time. I’m also examining experiences of exiting care and aging out of the system, which can often mean experiencing homelessness or incarceration, and how entanglement with the system can transform the meaning of kinship bonds for survivors. I’ll be drawing from tools and insights from a variety of philosophical traditions to accomplish this.”
Davies’ interest in researching the effects of the foster care system stemmed from a current lack of consideration of the foster care system within philosophy. Among her inspirations to explore this topic is Lisa Guenther, a feminist philosopher who studied the experience of incarceration and solitary confinement through critical phenomenology. And just like Guenther’s “Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives,” Davies aims to publish a first-of-a-kind book. “Many fields – including history, literature, sociology, anthropology, law, and creative writing – have all been studying the foster care system for decades, but there’s a gap in the literature in that no philosopher has yet thought seriously about the foster care system,” Davies said. “It’s encouraging that the urgency of this topic has been recognized in this way, and I’m thrilled that the NHC has offered me support to write this book in such a vibrant interdisciplinary context.”