Pitzer Professor Carina Johnson Wins Two Prestigious Fellowships

Claremont, Calif. (May 15, 2018)—Pitzer College Professor of History Carina Johnson has been awarded two major fellowships: the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin for fall 2018, and a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, School of Historical Studies, in Princeton, NJ, for spring 2019. Both awards will support her project Homefront Experiences of the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars, 1470-1620.

Johnson is one of only 24 individuals awarded a 2018-19 Berlin Prize, which provides outstanding scholars, writers, composers and artists from the US with the time and resources to work on academic and artistic projects they might not otherwise pursue. Princeton’s IAS fellows are chosen with the expectation that each member’s period of residence at the institute will result in work of significance and originality.

Johnson describes her project Homefront Experiences of the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars, 1470-1620 as “the continuation of my ongoing research on cultural exchange in the early modern world. It reflects my broader research and teaching goal to highlight the past’s radical difference from the present.”

Her study looks beyond the Islamophobia promoted by sixteenth-century German political and religious elites to explore the lived experiences of ordinary soldiers and refugees that were integral to shaping imperial politics, civic culture, concepts of masculine identity and knowledge about the Ottoman state and peoples, Johnson says.

Johnson’s research is closely related to the courses that she offers at Pitzer. She specializes in cross-cultural encounters, proto-ethnography and the experience of violence in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire. She is also interested in questions of material and visual culture, religious and cultural identities, and theorizing colonialism in the early modern era.

Carina Johnson is the author of Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans and co-editor of Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017. She joined Pitzer in 2002 and is a member of the History, Gender and Feminist Studies, and Religious Studies field groups. Johnson earned her PhD and MA in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in archeological studies and history from Yale University.

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