Prof. Annie Merrill Receives Boswell Family Faculty Fellowship

Professor of English and Thomson Professor of Environmental Studies Annie Merrill received the Boswell Family Faculty Fellowship for 2019-20.

The Boswell Family Faculty Fellowships were established by Tom and Cheryl Boswell to honor the exceptional education their sons experienced at Davidson. Boswell Fellowships provide salary, travel, and research funding for one or two faculty members each year to extend a sabbatical to a full year. Professor of Hispanic Studies Kyra Kietrys also received the 2019-20 fellowship.

Merrill is a devoted educator who has invested deeply in leadership and service at Davidson and nationally. Multiple departments and many colleagues and students have benefitted from her engagement with new ideas, new faculty members, new majors, and new approaches to teaching.

The talents of this interdisciplinary teacher-scholar range from being able to jump into a van to lead students on an experiential learning expedition to being able to sit still long enough to write a 10-year reaccreditation report. These capacities will serve her well during her Boswell Fellowship, during which she will travel to a number of archives in order to apply a variety of theoretical approaches to an interdisciplinary study of culture, history, beauty and the environment in her book-length manuscript, Flora's Interpreters: Popular Botany in Nineteenth-Century America.