Green Musselman receives NEH Fellowship

Assistant Professor of History Elizabeth Green Musselman is the recipient of a six-month fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The fellowship will provide $24,000 toward a research project that will culminate in a book-length history of the sciences in the Cape Colony (what is now the western half of South Africa). 

In this research, she plans to investigate how both European sciences and African ideas about nature shaped knowledge of the Cape's natural environment. For example, scientific expeditions through the colony usually employed Khoikhoi guides and other servants. These Africans' descriptions of plants and animals frequently made their way, unacknowledged, into European and colonial scientific publications. "In other words," she says, "I'm hypothesizing that science is an enterprise whose roots spread more broadly, and dig more deeply into culture, than we usually think." Green Musselman plans to take a leave of absence during spring 2003 to perform her research in South Africa and England.

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