College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Jennifer Adair, PhD, receives prestigious NEH grant in support of her research on Argentinian democracy
No Fairfield department has previously been awarded successive NEH grants, which speaks to the caliber of our young scholars...
— — David McFadden, PhD, professor and chair of ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ÊÓƵÎÞÏÞÖƹۿ´'s History Department
ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ÊÓƵÎÞÏÞÖƹۿ´ Assistant History Professor Jennifer Adair, PhD, has been awarded a $33,600 fellowship grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in recognition of her groundbreaking academic research on the history of Argentina's transition to a democracy in the 1980s. Her achievement marks the second successive NEH grant won by a history faculty member at Fairfield within the past two years, following Dr. Silvia Marsans-Sakly’s award for her advanced research on Tunisia in December 2017.
“The Department of History is very excited that Assistant Professor Adair has received this year-long grant in recognition of her superb scholarship,” said David McFadden, PhD, professor and chair of the College of Arts and Science’s History Department. “No Fairfield department has previously been awarded successive NEH grants, which speaks to the caliber of our young scholars and the overall excellence of our program.”
During a highly competitive application cycle in which only eight-percent of proposals were awarded funding by the NEH, Dr. Adair was selected as one of 74 university professors nationwide to receive the prestigious fellowship. The funding will be used to support the completion of her latest manuscript, In Search of the "Lost Decade": The Everyday Politics of Human Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina, a book-length study of Argentina's transition to democracy that focuses on the Raúl Alfonsín administration from 1983–1989.
In Search of the Lost Decade is the first in-depth history of Argentina’s transition to democracy following years of military rule, and examines how everyday citizens and grassroots community activists negotiated the country’s transition to democracy in the midst of state retrenchment, economic crisis, and a legacy of human rights abuses. The book draws on unpublished sources and oral histories that illuminate the less commonly known players and events that shaped post-dictatorship Argentina in the 1980s, and reveals the social logics that justified the rise of neoliberalism at the end of the twentieth century.
Dr. Adair received her PhD from New York University in 2013, and is an historian of Latin America and the Caribbean with a specific focus on modern Argentina and the Southern Cone. Her research examines the restoration of democracy in Argentina following decades of repressive military rule and political crisis and has been funded by fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
