Graduate student, alumnus awarded Woodrow Wilson fellowships

Kevin Ko, a doctoral candidate in history, and Derin McLeod ’08, a doctoral candidate in classics at the University of California-Berkeley, are among 22 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows for 2015.

Granted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Newcombe Fellowship is the nation’s largest such award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. Each fellow will receive a 12-month award of $25,000. Created in 1981, the fellowship has supported over 1,100 doctoral candidates, most of whom are now noted faculty at domestic and foreign institutions.

Ko’s dissertation, “Modern Bodies, Modern Souls: Religion, Medicine, and the Public Imagination in Late Colonial Indonesia,” explores modern formations of the body and the soul, the secular and the religious, the public and the private in a multi-religious context through a history of Christian and Islamic healthcare networks in late colonial Indonesia.

McLeod’s dissertation, “The Point of a Politeia: Changing Conceptions of Regimen and Regime from 500 to 350 B.C.E.,” explores fifth- and fourth-century Greek thinking about what a polis (a city, the primary unit of Greek political organization) could and should do for those living in it.

Founded in 1945, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation “identifies and develops the nation’s best minds to meet its most critical challenges.” For more information, visit the foundation’s website.