Miami University

Zinsser wins NEH fellowship

01/28/2000

Judith P. Zinsser, associate professor of history at Miami University, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for academic year 2000-2001.

Zinsser won the fellowship for her project, a critical biography of the Marquise Du Châtelet, a famous courtier, mathematician and philosophe in the first half of the French Enlightenment. In her day, Du Châtelet was famous for her book of "natural philosophy," Institutions de physique, and for her commentary on and translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia. Today she is bet remembered for her association with Voltaire, her companion from 1734 until her death.

In her book, Zinsser will examine the construction of biography, as well as the processes by which individuals become part of historical memory.

Zinsser, who joined Miami’s faculty in 1993, earned a bachelor’s degree form Bryn Mawr College, a master’s from Columbia University and a doctorate from Rutgers University.