Elizabeth Emery of French, German and Russian, and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo of Fine Arts have been awarded prestigious fellowships. Emery won a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend for a book project, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siecle France.

"Readers of Consuming the Past will discover the passion for the Middle Ages that swept France from 1870 to 1914," Emery wrote in her application. "In museums and churches, taverns and World's Fair pavilions, the French celebrated their nation's past, appropriating and reconfiguring historical narratives in order to create an ideal model of national achievement."

Emery is the fourth Montclair State faculty member to receive an NEH summer stipend. Past recipients are Joel Schwartz and Joe Moore of History, and Valdez del Alamo, who this year became the first Montclair State faculty member to win a George A. and Eliza Howard Foundation Fellowship.

The Howard Foundation at Brown University awards a limited number of fellowships each year for independent projects in selected fields. This year's field is painting, sculpture and art history. Valdez del Alamo won the award for Palace of the Mind: The Sculpture of Silos and the Transformation of Castilian Art in the 12th Century, a book on the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos and Spanish sculpture of the 12th century.

"Despite the acknowledged importance of Santo Domingo de Silos, no scholarly study has yet looked at the monastery's sculpture as a whole," Valdez del Alamo said. "This book will trace, via the sculpture of Silos, the introduction of Romanesque sculpture into the Iberian Peninsula and its development through the 12th century into the distinctively Castilian early Gothic style that flowered in Santiago de Compostela in 1188.

"The book," she continued, "considers how the meaning and reception of an image may change when transferred from the cloister to the context of a church portal, and the link between style and ideology." Susan Nanney of Research and Sponsored Programs said both the NEH and Howard Foundation award programs are competitive. "Only 9 percent of entrants are awarded funding," she said.

Next year, the Howard Foundation will award fellowships in the areas of music (composition, performance) and musicology, playwriting and theater arts.