Fellows
Davenport College has an active and enthusiastic Fellowship. Davenport’s Fellowship includes Fellows (distinguished Faculty and Staff at the University) and Associate Fellows (often Davenport alum or people who have made important contributions to New Haven and the larger society).
Sheryl Carter Negash
Principal Consultant
Biography
Sheryl Carter Negash is the daughter of Thomas (Factory Worker/Construction Worker who traveled north from the South during the second wave of the Great Migration), granddaughter of Frederick (Pullman Porter who died young because the local White hospital refused him treatment), and great granddaughter of Floyd (Entrepreneur who was enslaved during childhood). Sheryl believes that her lineage and lived experience as a Black woman inform her professional expertise as much as her education and work experience. Sheryl holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University.
Contact Information:
Robert Nelson
Professor of the History of Art, Yale University
Biography
I am an art historian with a core interest in medieval art, especially of the Byzantine Empire. But I also work on modern architecture from historical revival architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (i.e. Yale Campus) to modernism since World War II I am the grandfather of a beautiful little girl. My wife and I have two children, one a lawyer in the Bay Area, the other a graduate student working to become a therapist. I like reading contemporary fiction, gardening inside (orchids) and outside, and I collect American art pottery of the early twentieth century. But mostly I work on the book that I am writing about the long history of a medieval manuscript from the eleventh century to the present.
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Catherine Nicholson
Professor of English
Biography
I study early modern English literature and am especially interested in two, interrelated questions. First, what did "English" and "literature" mean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how have those meanings changed in the centuries after? Second, how might our answers to that question reshape the ways we read and think about English literature today? I've written two books, one on the emergence of the idea of English literature and the other on the four-hundred-year-long struggle between readers and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and am at work on a book about learning to read in early modern England. I live in Hamden with my husband and three kids. I love to read, like to cook, and am spectacularly unathletic. I go to Mass at St. Thomas More Chapel and am always up for talking about religion.