This year’s fellowship was awarded to Natalie Levin, a Ph.D. Candidate in the History department. A scholar of the relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews in early medieval Spain, in addition to her coursework in History and Medieval Studies, Natalie has spent the past three years learning Arabic, so that she can read the Muslim as well as the Christian (Latin) sources. In her dissertation, Natalie focuses on the relationship between the Muslim Umayyad caliphate of Spain and the Christian Ottonian Empire of Germany/Italy in the tenth century, analyzing “the diplomatic relationship they shared and explor[ing] how their communication and rivalry with one another helped shape their imperial self-representations.” In just a few weeks, she will be heading to Spain for a year on a Fulbright fellowship, where she will be spending a good deal of time doing archival research for this project.
The Andrea S. McRobbie Fellowship is an award that is made possible by a generous gift by President Michael McRobbie and his family in memory of Andrea McRobbie’s interest in medieval studies and is designated to honor an advanced graduate student engaged in “scholarship in medieval history, specifically some aspect of its social history or some theme in medieval social history.” This was the tenth year the fellowship has been awarded. At the MEST reception this fall, Arabella McRobbie was to present this year’s McRobbie Fellowship (pictured at left).
The College of Arts