Davis awarded fellowship at Institute for Advanced Study

History Professor Bradley Camp Davis has been selected as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), an independent theoretical research center in Princeton, NJ, for the 2025-26 academic year. Davis will be on residence at the IAS for the spring 2026 semester.

“This prestigious fellowship recognizes the significance of this scholar’s work, and it is an opportunity to advance their research and exchange ideas with scholars from around the world,” wrote Emma Eaton, editorial assistant at the IAS. Past and present faculty members of the IAS consist of 36 Nobel Laureates, 46 Fields Medalists, and 24 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as many MacArthur Fellows and Wolf Prize winners.

During his residency, Davis, a scholar of Southeast Asian and imperial Chinese history, will work on a book manuscript about the environmental history of 19^th-century Vietnam.

“The book will examine interactions between human and non-human life from an environmental-historical perspective,” said Davis, referring to the manuscript as a “multi-species history.”

The concept of the book emerged from Davis’s teaching work at Eastern, “namely classes on environmental and animal history,” said Davis. “This was partially a result of my own research, but also grew organically from conversations with students, many of whom posed very compelling questions about environmental history in other classes.”

Davis continued: “There is a strong link between the classes I offer to students at Eastern and the work that I publish as a historian. I imagine that this will continue to be the case throughout my career.”

Davis is no stranger to being a scholar in residence — he was twice an invited professor at the University of Paris and once in Yale University’s Program in Agrarian Studies. At the IAS, Davis will focus more on his studies than teaching, a change from his typical workload.

“My membership in residence at the IAS for the spring will be different in that I will devote most of my time to writing and participating in the academic community there, which means attending talks and sharing my work with others at the Institute,” he said.

Travel has been an integral part of Davis’s research process during the writing of this book, as he has made trips to Southeast Asia and France in search of fellowships and funding. The IAS, however, “offers a chance to dedicate several months just to writing, which will mean I can make substantial progress towards completing the book,” he said.

“I am very grateful not only for the opportunity, but also for the support that I have received from Eastern to pursue it.”