ESM professor wins research fellowship

onathan Baldo, associate professor of English and chair of the humanities department at the Eastman School, has been awarded one of 65 fellowships for 2000-2001 from the American Council of Learned Societies.

The $40,000 fellowship will be used to complete a book on the subject of the rising national consciousness in Elizabethan England as reflected in Shakespeare's plays. Baldo intends to explore the ways in which England's emergence as a nation entailed changing ways of remembering its past.

"England was the first European country to become a nation in the modern sense," Baldo said. "In Shakespeare's plays the relative values of remembering and forgetting the past are continually reexamined. Like our own day, in which the information revolution has already begun to influence the ways in which we preserve our past, Shakespeare's day saw a comparable technological change--the printing revolution--which altered England's relation to its past. Part of the projected book will compare current controversies over personal and collective memory with the situation in Shakespeare's England."

Baldo, who has taught at Eastman since 1983, is taking a year's leave of absence to pursue his research.

The American Council of Learned Societies, with offices in New York City, is a private, nonprofit federation of 63 scholarly associations devoted to the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning.

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