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Posted: 9/15/22

TAMIU's Dr. Adam Kozaczka Receives Fellowship to Examine Trials, Legal Issues Involving Dueling in the 18th Century

 

Dr. Adam Kozaczka
Dr. Adam Kozaczka  

Texas A&M International University (TAMIU)  assistant professor of English Dr. Adam Kozaczka is the recipient of a prestigious fellowship aimed at helping scholars expand the field of 18th Century studies for research and teaching.

Gale, part of Cengage Group, in partnership with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), has awarded Dr. Kozaczka and four other researchers fellowships known as the Gale-ASECS Non-Residential Fellowships.

Funded by Gale, each fellow receives a stipend and access to Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) as well as access to the Gale Digital Scholar Lab (The Lab). Using The Lab, the program provides fellows with invaluable text and data mining tools to explore ECCO and advance their work using digital humanities methods.

Kozaczka's project will examine a subset of trials and newspaper reports related to dueling, a practice relatively common during the 18th Century that would become extinct in Britain by the mid-19th Century. Interested in justifiable homicide, excusable homicide, and the rise of manslaughter as a charge, Kozaczka will study cases in which defendants do not deny committing the act in question, yet nevertheless receive not guilty verdicts.

There is a lack of consensus among scholars who examine the history of dueling in Britain. Through a digital humanities intervention, Kozaczka seeks to resolve these often fact-based disagreements through the weight of data.

“The Gale-ASECS Fellowships offer an innovative program of support for scholars committed to broadening and deepening the role of digital humanities scholarship in the long 18th Century,” said Dr. Benita Blessing, executive director of ASECS. “Access to Gale Digital Scholar Lab will allow these Fellows the opportunity to explore the use of digital humanities methodologies in new ways both in their research and their classrooms. We are excited to see the research outcomes and pedagogical applications that emerge from these projects that will influence and inspire not only the field of 18th Century studies, but scholars who engage with digital humanities projects more broadly.” 

ECCO gives the fellows instant access to over 30 million pages of digitized primary sources to help them enhance their research projects and uncover new research pathways. By exploring the series with text and data mining tools in The Lab, the fellows can open their research to modern digital humanities methods.

“We're pleased to support members of the ASECS with these Fellowships," said Seth Cayley, vice president of global academic product at Gale. “Over nearly two decades, ECCO has become an essential and much-loved resource for eighteenth-century scholars across the world. I’m delighted we can offer the Fellows this vast collection of 18th Century materials with The Lab, allowing them to use its analysis tools to conduct a distant reading of texts, explore topics and patterns across the 18th Century, and make fresh new discoveries to enrich their research projects.”

Scholars must complete the fellowships and submit a fellowship report. Each fellowship will support the equivalent of one month's full-time work.

Dr. Kozaczka said he is honored by the ASECS and Gale Research recognition.

"It’s an honor to be recognized by ASECS and by Gale Research, which provides top-quality academic databases and other resources from scholars across many fields of study," he said, "Digital Humanities is very much the future of work in fields like literature, language, and history, and I am excited about this opportunity to use data modelling and distant reading strategies to process thousands of primary sources in pursuit of answers to my research questions."

He continued, "I couldn’t have done it without support of my colleagues at TAMIU who remind me on a daily basis about the importance of interdisciplinarity. I hope my project lives up to their standards and to the high bar set by Humanities chair Dr. Debbie Lelekis, College of Arts and Sciences dean Dr. Claudia San Miguel, and University provost Dr. Tom Mitchell."

Born and raised in a bilingual English-Polish home in New York State, Kozaczka earned his Ph.D. in English from Syracuse University, where he began an interdisciplinary project in law and literature, pieces of which are in print and forthcoming in a number of academic journals including European Romantic Review and Studies in Romanticism. Deeply invested in public humanities programming, he recently received two Humanities Texas grants to facilitate virtual speaker events designed to promote and explore diversity in the humanities.

In April, Kozaczka was one of 12 distinguished Texas A&M University System faculty and professionals awarded the 2022 Chancellor's Medallion for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Other Fellowship recipients include Heather Heckman-McKenna, doctoral candidate, English, University of Missouri; Dr. Jared Richman, associate professor of English, Colorado College; Dr. Daniel Watkins, assistant professor of History, Baylor University, and Sara Weston, doctoral candidate, English, Yale University.

About Cengage Group and Gale

Cengage Group, an education technology company serving millions of learners in 165 countries, advances the way students learn through quality, digital experiences. The company currently serves the K-12, higher education, professional, library, English language teaching and workforce training markets worldwide. Gale, part of Cengage Group, provides libraries with original and curated content, as well as the modern research tools and technology that are crucial in connecting libraries to learning, and learners to libraries. For more than 65 years, Gale has partnered with libraries around the world to empower the discovery of knowledge and insights.

About American Society for 18th-Century Studies (ASECS)

The American Society for 18th Century Studies (ASECS), established in 1969, is the foremost learned society in the United States for the study of all aspects of the period from the later 17th through the early 19th Century. Its members are literary scholars and writers, historians, theorists of gender, race, sexuality, disability, nation and empire; philosophers and political theorists; art historians and artists; musicologists and musicians; theater historians and practitioners; biographers and bibliographers; and specialists in other humanistic, artistic, and social scientific fields with a range of broad and more particular interests. It is committed to fostering an inclusive and welcoming environment in which all members participate fully in the exchange of knowledge and ideas.

For more information, please contact TAMIU's Office of Public Relations, Marketing and Information Services at 956.326.2180, email prmis@tamiu.edu or visit offices located in the Sue and Radcliffe Killam Library, room 268.