Two Kingsborough Professors Named 2022 Mellon/ACLS Fellows
Two Kingsborough Community College professors, Sara Rutkowski (English) and Elke Weesjes Sabella (history), were named 2022 Mellon/ACLS Fellows by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
Two Kingsborough Professors Named 2022 Mellon/ACLS Fellows
Two Kingsborough Community College professors were named 2022 Mellon/ACLS Fellows by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The awardees are associate professor of English, Sara Rutkowski, and substitute assistant professor of history, Elke Weesjes Sabella. They are among thirty 2022 fellows from across the country, 13 of whom are from The City University of New York (CUNY).
Launched in 2018 with the support of the Mellon Foundation, the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship offers teaching staff at two-year colleges support for research projects in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The four-year initiative has recognized the vital and diverse contributions of more than one hundred community college faculty to humanistic research and teaching.
The 30 awardees selected for the final cohort for the program will each receive $40,000 to advance their projects, many of which include research, community engagement, and pedagogical dimensions. The fellows also will participate in a multi-day convening hosted by ACLS that will bring current and past awardee cohorts together with academic leaders to share perspectives from their work.
Sara Rutkowski’s ACLS/Mellon Fellowship will support the development of a proposal for a first-of-its kind series of four books on the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a New Deal program that sent thousands of unemployed workers out to document American life during the 1930s. It builds on her volume of edited essays, “Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project,” to be published in the fall of 2022 (UMass Press).
She became interested in the topic in graduate school, when she began researching the connection between government programs and literary movements. “I was amazed by the breadth of the FWP and the way in touched on so many aspects of American life. After spending weeks in the Library of Congress archives going through unpublished transcripts of folklore from the FWP, I was hooked.” She wrote her dissertation on the literary legacy of the FWP and later published a monograph on the same subject.
“By telling the stories of ordinary Americans, the architects of the FWP wanted to counter the rising tide of fascism abroad, along with the cries of nativism, and growing anti-immigrant, rightwing populism at home.” she explained. “They wanted to celebrate the nation’s cultural diversity, which of course still really resonates today.”
“As I was working on this first volume, I discovered a wealth of new research about the FWP,” recounted Rutkowski. “Not only did the FWP generate an extraordinary collection of American guidebooks and oral history, among which are hundreds of interviews with the last generation of living former slaves, it also helped to launch the careers of many writers, including Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nelson Algren, to name a few.”
“I am incredibly grateful to receive the Mellon/ACLS fellowship, and by its completion I hope to have this series underway to help inspire yet more research into and interest in the FWP, for scholars, teachers, and students alike,” said Rutkowski.
Elke Weesjes Sabella’s oral history project, “Children of the Klan – Growing up in the American Far Right 1960-2000,” asks the question “If no one is born a racist, how are they made?” “Social histories of movements on the far right are notably scarce,” noted Sabella. “To truly understand how and why people radicalize, we must analyze the lives and experiences of the ordinary men and women who joined these groups. How did they identify themselves? How were they identified by others? What was it about their lives that coincided with the agenda of far-right politics? And how did they transmit their racist politics and rigid ideology from one generation to the next?” Her ACLS/Mellon Fellowship project draws on a series of interviews with 15 children who grew up in Ku Klux Klan (KKK) families in the latter part of the 20th century, auto/biographies, archival materials, and existing historiography of the KKK, in hopes of uncovering answers to these questions.
The project was inspired by a previous oral history project about communist family life in the Netherlands and Britain, for which she conducted a series of interviews with 38 children of working-class rank-and-file members of the Dutch and British communist party who grew up during the Cold War. That project resulted in a monograph titled “Growing Up Communist in the Netherlands and Britain: Childhood, Political Activism, and Identity Formation” (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), five research papers in peer-reviewed academic journals, and a forthcoming book titled “Rode Levens: Communistische Gezinnen in de Koude Oorlog (Red Lives: Communist Families in the Cold War)” (Walburg Pers, 2023). “I gained a deep understanding of the radicalization processes of far-left organizations. As I was completing my project about communist family life, I started to think about the far right in the United States and how little we know about people who join hate groups like the KKK,” she recalled.
Her current research is also the basis of a course she has developed to introduce Kingsborough students to the history of hate groups in the United States. Currently under review, the course will cover the KKK of the late 19th century thru 21st century groups, such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Sabella sees this work as an extension of her work as the newly hired research director at Kingsborough’s Holocaust Center. “It is my mission to expand the Center’s focus to include the history of antisemitism, racism, and prejudice in the United States and beyond,” she offered. “Instead of presenting the cruelty of the Holocaust as an isolated event, it is more useful for students to anchor the Holocaust into a much larger and longer history of hatred and political polarization. The most recent outburst of racial violence and antisemitism in this country should also be understood within this framework.” This fall, the Center will feature a photo exhibition by Anthony Karen, who has been documenting the far right since the early 2000s.
“I hope my research project, history course, and event series at the Holocaust Center will increase our understanding of radicalization and polarization in the United States and open up discussion about hate groups in the classroom, our Holocaust Center and beyond,” she said.
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