Graduate students Bruce and Zwart win awards

David Zwart, a Phd. candidate in American History, received a West European Studies Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to study the Dutch language at the Summer Dutch Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington for Summer 2007. The fellowship carries a stipend of $2500 and a fee scholarship covering up to $4000 of tuition.

Travis Bruce, who specializes in medieval history, has won the Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The Graduate College offers Dissertation Completion Fellowships for two semesters and two sessions awarded in open competition and on the basis of superior scholarly achievement to assist full-time doctoral students with the completion of their dissertations.

Bruce's dissertation, titled "The Politics of Intercultural Exchange: The Taifa of Denia and the Western Mediterranean," deals with Denia which is today a small resort town on the coast of Spain, but in the eleventh century was one of the major Mediterranean ports and an important Spanish-Muslim kingdom. In his research, Bruce uses Denia as a means to examine the relationship between state construction and medieval Mediterranean communications. Denia was one of the kingdoms that grew out of the disintegrated caliphate of Cordova in the eleventh century, and its rulers developed a unique policy of building their new state according to the communications networks of the Western Mediterranean. Denia maintained strong ties with the Islamic Mediterranean World, but also with Christian ports such as Pisa and Barcelona. This policy reoriented trade networks and settlement patterns within the kingdom of Denia and the political and even physical structure of the state was determined by its participation in the Mediterranean world.