Hugh Nibley Fellowships have been awarded by the Maxwell Institute to eager graduate students since 1995. One hundred students have been supported since the beginning of the program, and between them they have received over two hundred and forty individual awards (past recipients here) valued all together in excess of half a million dollars. Today we are pleased to announce the Nibley Fellowship recipients for the academic year 2013–14. The recipients are listed here, together with brief biographical notes on each. They are an impressive bunch—perhaps even more impressive than previous years! (I write as a past Fellow.) The competition for awards has certainly grown steadily, and many more worthy applicants were turned away this year than ever before. This alone is a good indication of the robustness and competence of the current cohort of LDS graduate students in religious and ancient studies.
The Nibley Fellowship program now has a splendid website. Here the curious can find out about current and past Fellows, while the patient will soon be able to find details of the Nibley Fellowship Prize, as well as a generous number of resources for current and aspiring graduate students (a community effort led by current Nibley Fellows). The attentive will see that the new website describes a revised (and we hope improved) form of the Fellowship program, which will be open to applicants in the coming academic year. Changes include a small number of more substantial awards for advanced PhD students, and the option for students to apply for travel stipends to speak at, or simply attend, an academic conference central to their discipline or research interests.
The honor of being a Hugh Nibley Fellow is found less in beating out the competition or in the monetary stipend, and more in enjoying an association with a brilliant and prodigious LDS scholar. Hugh Nibley may be inimitable, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying and certainly shouldn’t stop a new generation of scholars from enjoying his writings and his thought.
Congratulations again to this year’s recipients!
