CELIA is a major force for continuing the development of a highly engaged, inspired, and enthusiastic community of scholars and creatives on the Wright State campus. Through the CELIA Fellows Program, arts, humanities, and social science faculty from the College of Liberal Arts develop innovative projects in a multidisciplinary think-tank atmosphere. The mission of each semester’s team of Fellows is to collaborate as a whole or in small groups to produce original compositions, performances, presentations, courses, and/or scholarly writings focused on fresh approaches and/or solutions for any of a myriad of topical issues. Outcomes are developed by team members in consultation with the CELIA director and other faculty mentors (many of them faculty emeriti), who will act as moderators of weekly brainstorming and project development sessions.

Fellows are encouraged to share ideas with colleagues, and to engender the idea of community and conversation campus-wide among faculty and students.

Tangible creative outcomes are required at the end of each semester, and are presented in print, performance or exhibit, and/or at the annual CELIA conference.

CELIA Fellows Program Application (PDF)

CELIA Fellow for Spring 2013

Dr. Crystal Lake, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literatures

Crystal completed her PhD at the University of Missouri in 2008, specializing in eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature. From 2008-2011, Crystal was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Crystal’s research examines the relationships between literary texts and material culture in Britain from 1660-1840. Crystal is currently completing two major projects: a study of eighteenth-century archaeology and a history of Regency parties. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in English Literary History (ELH), The Review of English Studies (RES), Modern Philology, The Eighteenth Century, and The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Women Writers. Her research has been supported by fellowships from The Lewis Walpole Library, The Yale Center for British Art, and The Chawton House Library, and she has been recognized with awards from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Writers.  Crystal joined the faculty in the English Department at Wright State University in Fall of 2011.

CELIA Fellow for Fall 2013

Dr. Paul Lockhart, Professor of History

A native of Poughkeepsie, New York, Paul Lockhart has been teaching European and military history at Wright State for twenty-four years.  During that time, his research interests have changed somewhat.  After writing four academic books on the political and religious history of Scandinavia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he returned to his “roots” in the history of war, broadly defined.  Lockhart also turned to a different calling and a new audience.  Believing strongly that historians should try to reach beyond the tightly-circumscribed limits of their own profession to engage a larger lay public, in 2006 Lockhart started to write for a general audience, combining archival research with the strong narrative tradition of “popular history.”  The result: his two most recent books, one on the man who trained Washington’s Continental Army in the Revolution (The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army, HarperCollins, 2008), and another on the first major engagement of the Revolution (The Whites of Their Eyes: Bunker Hill, the First American Army, and the Emergence of George Washington, HarperCollins, 2011).

In the past year, though, Lockhart has turned his attentions to the First World War, and specifically the American experience in the great European tragedy.  He is currently working on his seventh book, which tells the story of the Great War – on the home front and in the trenches – through the lives of Teddy Roosevelt and his children.

And that, in turn, led to Lockhart’s CELIA project: “The Hell Where Youth and Laughter Go: America, the World, and the Great War.”