UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 31, Page 8
May 13, 1993
American history prof receives 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship

     Christine Leigh Heyrman, associate professor of history, has received
a 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship to continue her studies of spiritual lives in
the Southern backcountry, 1770-1820.
     The 1993 Guggenheim selection committee chose 146 scholars, artists
and scientists from among nearly 3,000 applicants for fellowship awards
totaling $3,925,000.
     Heyrman, who lives in Churchville, Md., will be on leave from the
University during the 1993-94 academic year. In addition to the Guggenheim,
she also has been named a fellow at the Shelby-Cullom-Davis Center for
Historical Studies at Princeton for the spring semester of 1994 and has
received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.
     A member of the Delaware faculty for three years, she is an early
American historian, specializing in the beginning of settlement (1607) to
the War of 1812.
     Her grants will fund further study of the religious culture of the
early southwestern frontier-Kentucky, Tennessee, the western Carolinas and
western Virginia. She will look at religious beliefs and practices of
ordinary people from 1770-1829, when major evangelist denominations such as
Baptists and Methodists began to take root in the South and move west over
the Appalachians. Her study will look at the success of evangelistic
Protestant denominations in the West and at "popular super
naturalism"--folklore, witchcraft and magic and exchanges across the
frontier between white settlers and American Indians. At the University,
Heyrman teaches an American history survey course, a course on the history
of the American revolution and graduate seminars on early American history.
     Heyrman earned her bachelor's degree in history at Macalester College
in 1971 and her doctorate in American studies from Yale University in 1977.
At Yale, she won the George Washington Egleston Dissertation Prize, the
Theron Rockwell Field Dissertation Prize and a teaching fellowship.
     Before joining the University of Delaware, she was an associate
professor of history at Brandeis University and the University of
California, Irvine, and she served as the Cardozo Visiting Associate
Professor of History at Yale.
     Her publications include the book, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime
Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750, and contributions to two
volumes of Nation of Nations: A Republic and Its People.
                                        -Beth Thomas