We are delighted to announce that Rob Bates will be taking up a Frank Knox Visiting Fellowship at Harvard University. Rob is a PhD candidate in American History at Queens’ and came to us from Newcastle upon Tyne, where he grew up and read his undergraduate and Master's degrees at Newcastle University.
Rob’s PhD thesis analyses the United States Pension Bureau, which oversaw the system of pensions created for veterans of the American Civil War during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was one of the largest programmes undertaken by the United States government during this period, consuming millions of dollars annually and providing assistance to those wounded or disabled while serving in the Union Army. Rob's research reconsiders the allegations of fraud and corruption which plagued the pension system from its inception and highlights their influence in determining American attitudes towards public welfare programmes during the first half of the twentieth century. In the future, Rob hopes to explore conceptions of bureaucracy in the turn-of-the-century United States, focusing on the day-to-day administrative practices of government workers and their interactions with American citizens. Rob is supervised by Gary Gerstle, the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge.
Rob says:
“I am honoured to have been awarded a Frank Knox Fellowship at Harvard. It provides an amazing opportunity to engage with scholars in both the Departments of History and Government whose work has directly inspired my own and to push my work in exciting directions. As a historian of the United States, it is doubly exciting to spend time at a university which has educated so many men and women who have played significant roles in the nation's history.”
The Frank Knox Memorial Fellowships were established at Harvard University in 1945 by a gift from Annie Reid Knox, wife of the late Frank Knox. Knox, who served as U.S. Secretary of the Navy in the 1940s and was a highly regarded politician and businessman, believed that strong ties between the United States and Britain were essential to international peace. The Knox Fellowship program promotes this legacy through scholarly exchange between the U.S., Britain and the dominions of the British Commonwealth.
If any Fellows, students, staff or alumni have news items they would like to be featured on the College website, please send them to the Communications Officer, Alice Webster.