KU News Release

Leslie Tuttle

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• Department of History

LAWRENCE — Leslie Tuttle, assistant professor of history at the University of Kansas, has been named one of 30 recipients of a 2010 National Humanities Center Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards available to university faculty in the humanities.

This year, 442 applications were submitted to the competition, and the recipients represent institutions in the United States, Brazil, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

“I’m so grateful for this opportunity to concentrate on my research, and I can’t wait to get started,” Tuttle said.

The $35,000 award will enable her to spend the next academic year in North Carolina as part of a community of scholars at the National Humanities Center, a private, nonprofit institution for advanced study in the humanities.

Tuttle will spend most of her time writing a book on historical ideas about dreaming and how those ideas influenced the dramatic change in the definition of knowledge and truth that occurred between 1500 and 1800. Her goal is to complete at least three chapters during her residency and advance the book’s publication date by a year or more.

This is the ninth time a KU faculty member has received the fellowship since its creation in 1978 and the fifth in the past decade. Previous honorees are Andrew Debicki, Spanish, 1979 and 1992; Edward Williams, music, 1980; John Clark, history,1981; Luis Corteguera, history, 2001; Rex Martin, philosophy, 2004; and Maryemma Graham, English, 2005 and 2006.

Tuttle joined the KU faculty in 2003 following completion of a doctoral degree at Princeton University. She teaches courses on women’s history, the history of sexuality and European history. In 2009, she received a Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence at KU.

“The National Humanities Center Fellowship is a great honor for Leslie and for KU,” said Victor Bailey, director of KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities, where Tuttle was recently named a Humanities Research Fellow for 2010-11. “She’s already making a productive contribution to her field of research, and we’re pleased to be supporting her work.”

Last year, also through the Hall Center, Tuttle received the Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Studies Book Publication Award in support of “Conceiving the Old Regime,” a work to be published in April by Oxford University Press. The book traces the French monarchy’s growing intervention in the marital and sexual lives of French men and women in the 17th and 18th centuries. According to one reviewer, it “makes a significant contribution to family history and state building in early modern France by opening a new window that allows us to see the interplay between individuals, communities and the state.”