CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois professor Emily E. LB. Twarog is the recipient of a 2019 Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Twarog, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois and the director of the Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference, is one of 21 fellows chosen by the Burkhardt program, which aims to support residential research projects for recently tenured faculty members, according to an ACLS news release.
“In chronicling the role that middle- and working-class women have played at the intersection of politics and the labor movement from the 20th century to the present day, Professor Twarog’s scholarship has deepened our knowledge of a marginalized and underserved area of inquiry,” said Andreas C. Cangellaris, the vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost of the Urbana campus. “She is an insightful scholar and well-deserving of this recognition.”
The award will support Twarog’s work on her second book, “Hands Off: The History of Sexual Harassment Resistance in the Service Sector, 1935-2018,” which will focus on how women workers have resisted sexual harassment in various workplace settings.
“There’s very little historical research from before 1970 on sexual harassment and the ways in which women have organized around sexual harassment, so that prompted me to undertake this project,” said Twarog, the author of “Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth Century America,” published in 2017 by Oxford University Press.
Burkhardt Fellowships carry a $95,000 stipend and a $7,500 research budget, and allow awardees to take yearlong residencies at institutions whose resources and scholarly communities are suited to facilitate the proposed research project. The fellowships are designed to accommodate long-term, multiyear research projects and may take place in any of the three academic years following the fellow’s selection, according to the release.
“I’ll be in residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and I’ll also be able to travel to archives around the country and do research,” Twarog said. “But for the most part, the fellowship will allow me the time I need to write the book.”
Founded in 1919, the ACLS is a private, nonprofit federation of 74 national scholarly organizations, advancing scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. It will award over $18 million in fellowships and grants in 2019 to more than 300 scholars worldwide.
The fellowships are named for the late Frederick Burkhardt, the president emeritus of ACLS, whose decades of work on “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin” exemplify the dedication necessary for demanding and ambitious scholarly enterprise.
The Burkhardt Fellowship program is made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Editor’s notes: To contact Emily E. LB. Twarog, call 312-413-0166; email etwarog@illinois.edu.
