Dr. Katherine Carlson
Lee University faculty members Dr. Katherine Carlson and Dr. Brian Peterson have been awarded Post-Doctoral Faculty Fellowships from the Appalachian College Association for use on individual projects this coming summer.
“We know that we have outstanding faculty at Lee, but it is always affirming when they are individually recognized by other organizations,” said Dr. Debbie Murray, vice president for Academic Affairs at Lee. “We celebrate with Drs. Carlson and Peterson, and we congratulate them for this recognition of their research.”
Dr. Carlson said of the news, “ACA funds will enable me to travel to the United Kingdom this summer, where I will complete archival research for my book on 19th-century children who were bestselling authors. Notice of an award is always exciting, but learning the news during finals week last December made for particularly uplifting timing. The ACA has made both the researcher and the Anglophile in me very happy.”
Dr. Carlson’s work is titled “Prodigies in Print: How Bestselling 19th-Century Children Changed Literary History and Why We Forgot Them.” Dr. Carlson analyzed child-authors through the lens of feminism and New Historicism in her dissertation and will use the fellowship to reframe her manuscript to give it a broader application by focusing on the instrumental role children played in the intellectual property debates at the end of the 19th century.
Dr. Carlson’s work centers in the period 1858-1920, during which there was a pattern of bestselling published writing by, or in collaboration with, children. According to Dr. Carlson, the significance of these works has been mostly forgotten, and no book-length work yet exists which focuses on writers who won their fame exclusively as children. Dr. Carlson seeks to fill this gap and explain why published 19th-century children fell from view just as the modern intellectual environment has begun to welcome and embrace ostracized voices and new definitions of creativity.
Dr. Carlson, assistant professor of English at Lee, earned her doctorate in 19th-Century British Literature from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, her master’s in English from UNC at Chapel Hill, and her bachelor’s in English from Whitworth University. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Women Writers and The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and she has presented at a variety of conferences both in the United States and abroad. During her time at Lee, she has taught a variety of literature courses, including Victorian Literature, Romantic Literature, and British Literature (1798-Present). Dr. Carlson is also an avid photographer and one of her chief passions is helping students to see beyond the stereotypes of the Victorian period.
Dr. Peterson will continue his research and archeological work in Israel, where the project has already received significant recognition. His discovery of an Egyptian amulet was noted by Christianity Today as the most important archaeological discovery of 2013. His research continues to be published in both Israeli and North American journals, and the ACA fellowship will make it possible for him to continue research in Israel which is considered to be time-sensitive due to possible site restriction or destruction.
"Being awarded the ACA fellowship is truly a blessing,” said Dr. Peterson. “It will not only help me with my expenses to travel to Israel to do my archaeological field research, but it will also cover many of my research costs this summer while at the University of Toronto in Canada.”
The project at the site of Khirbet el-Maqatir, located nine miles north of Jerusalem, began in 1995, and it has faced difficulties such as settlement encroachment, vandalism and looting, and tenuous political situations in Israel. According to Dr. Peterson, the project is considered important for scholarly understanding of life and conflict in ancient Palestine and Canaan from the Middle Bronze Age to the early Byzantine Empire. His research serves to further the understanding of the ancient history of the area.
Dr. Peterson, assistant professor of Old Testament at Lee, earned his doctorate at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto, his master’s degrees from Beeson Divinity School and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and his bachelor’s at Zion Bible College. His passion is combining biblical narrative with historical and archaeological records. He currently teaches a variety of Old Testament classes and Introductory Hebrew at Lee as well as spends a portion of his summers excavating in Israel.
The ACA is a non-profit collaboration of 35 private four-year liberal arts institutions spread across the central Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The organization helps develop and share ideas, information, programs, and resources among its members to achieve its goals of serving the people of Appalachia through higher education and related services. The Faculty Fellowships Program is the longest running program of the ACA and is intended to further the development of faculty at institutions within the ACA.
For more information about the ACA or their Faculty Fellowship Program, visit www.acaweb.org.
Dr. Brian Peterson