(Dallas, TX) Tracy Chapman Hamilton, associate professor and director of faculty development at Sweet Briar College, is the recipient of the 2022 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship.

Established to honor well-known medievalist Bonnie Wheeler as she entered the fourth decade of her distinguished teaching career, The Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship Fund of The Dallas Foundation is designed to support the research of women medievalists with tenure below the rank of full professor. In addition to a generous stipend, each recipient is paired with a distinguished mentor in the field who engages with the recipient and her project to its successful completion. The fellowship aims to help women get “unstuck” and move to full professor, while cultivating women as academic leaders.

Tracy Chapman Hamilton will receive the $25,000 fellowship and the support of a mentor in her field as she completes her research that explores questions of gender in premodern Europe and the Mediterranean. The Wheeler Fellowship will help her complete a book on The Ceremonial Landscape: Art, Gender, and Geography in Late Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. In it, Hamilton studies how women patrons of the Late Capetian and early Valois periods perceived, celebrated, and manipulated events such as weddings, tournaments, pilgrimages, funerals, and foundation ceremonies to create visual backdrops for a geographical web of objects they created, exchanged, and commissioned.

Anne Yardley, president of the fund commented: “The Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship Fund is excited to help Professor Hamilton bring this important multi-disciplinary project to fruition. Along with its related collaborative database and digital project, Mapping the Global Medieval Woman, the book breaks new ground in its exploration of the ways women connected their natal and marital lands. We congratulate Professor Hamilton on her election to the Council of the Medival Academy of America and look forward to the completion of this project.”

Professor Hamilton received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and has held positions at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Richmond where she was an NEH Visiting Associate Professor, and Sweet Briar College, where she is currently Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Faculty Development.