Baker, Hoffman win NEH research fellowships

by Tom Parisi

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded its highly coveted research fellowships to two NIU professors—one exploring the history of U.S. health care and the other shedding light on a famous British writer who pioneered the detective novel.

In Illinois, only seven scholars won the fellowships, including NIU's Beatrix Hoffman in the Department of History and William Baker, who has a joint appointment with University Libraries and the Department of English.

The NEH fellowships will permit the scholars to conduct research on a full-time basis during the 2002-03 academic year. Nationally, NEH awarded 150 fellowships from 1,300 applicants.

As part of a federal partnership, NEH and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, selected Hoffman as an AHRQ/NEH fellow, one of only seven nationally. Each agency will contribute $20,000 toward her fellowship.

Within days of learning of the NEH grant, Hoffman was notified that she also has been selected as recipient of the Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That award provides $270,000 in research funding, spread over three years, during which time Hoffman plans to continue teaching part-time. She teaches U.S. history and the history of medicine.

"Years ago, I did some studying in England and that's when it really struck me how different our health care system is in the United States," Hoffman said. "I came back with the burning question, why don't we provide health care to everybody as a right? I think it's a measure of a country's willingness to care for its citizens."

In January 2001, Hoffman published her first book, "The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America." Her new research project is aimed toward a second book that will examine the debates over the right to health care in the United States during the 20^th century.

"I want to focus on the experience of Americans in a system that does not provide them with a right to health care," Hoffman explained.

She will examine the thorny issues of care for the poor, insurance companies' obligations to policyholders, hospitals' efforts to admit or ban patients based on race, citizenship status or ability to pay and patient lawsuits and protests against the denial of health care.

"Americans spend more money per capita on health care than other industrialized countries, yet more than 40 million Americans have no health coverage at all," Hoffman said. "So it's not only an unjust system but an inefficient one."

Hoffman said the research grants will help cover expenses for travel, including a planned trip to the Southwest, where she will study the issue of health care access for undocumented immigrants. She also will be studying archives in Chicago, Birmingham, New York and Washington D.C., where she hopes to interview political leaders who have had prominent roles in the health care debates.

Baker, meanwhile, will travel to five U.S. scholarly libraries and archives as part of his year-long NEH Research Fellowship, which is accompanied by a $40,000 grant. Baker will use his fellowship year to edit and annotate the unpublished letters of the British Victorian writer, Wilkie Collins.

Collins was a man of many talents. Fans of mystery stories will recognize him as the author of the first English detective novel, "The Moonstone."

"T. S. Eliot called it `the first and greatest of English detective novels,'" Baker said. "It's still in print and still popular. It was serialized recently on PBS."

Collins also was a journalist, dramatist and short story writer. His letters to acquaintances have broad ramifications. For instance, his collaboration with Charles Dickens illuminates the development and exploitation of serialized novels, his interest in aspects of Victorian law helped clarify the status of women and his letters to publishers provide insight into contemporary issues relating to copyright.

At NIU, Baker teaches Shakespeare, bibliography and methods of research and 19^th century novel and prose. He has published or edited at least seven books on George Eliot, the well-known Victorian novelist.

Baker also edits the prestigious "Year's Work in English Studies" (Oxford University Press), an annual review of scholarly work on the English language and on literatures written in English.

He has long had an interest in Collins and was co-editor of a two-volume edition, "The Letters of Wilkie Collins," published in 1999 in London and New York. Well received in the British national press, the book received the Choice academic book-of-the-year award in 2000.

The letters to be included in the NEH fellowship project have not previously been published. Sensitive to Wilkie Collins' unconventional lifestyle in Victorian England, where he lived with two mistresses, his heirs until recently were reluctant to expose his letters to public scrutiny. Now they have given permission, and Baker will have access to more than 2,000 unpublished letters. He anticipates a three-volume work will result from his research.

"Collins' great-granddaughter, who is the last surviving relative, said her father did not want to hear the author's name mentioned in the house because of the stigma of illegitimacy," Baker said.