Dr. Scott Newstok, professor of English and executive director of the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College, has been awarded a four-year grant from the State Research Agency of Spain. This award will support his scholarship on the multilingual heritage of early modern English across legal, religious, political, and literary discourses. Newstok’s project was one of 37 funded among 254 applications; in the three-year history of Spain’s research program, he is the second recipient who works in the humanities, and the only recipient from a liberal arts college.
According to Newstok, contemporary debates about English as an ‘official language’ overlook the radical hybridity of English itself, traces of which remain extant in its remarkable lexicon. “My project synthesizes enduring humanistic practices (close reading, etymology, literary history) with computational methods to revisit the landmarks of English literary production—not only Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, but also biblical translation, administrative formulae, and the first dictionaries—as the rich outgrowth of an ongoing ‘denization’ of other languages.”
To conduct this research, Newstok will return to the institution that hosted him as a 2022 Fulbright Scholar, the University of Murcia, whose Department of English Philology includes faculty cohorts in Renaissance culture as well as digital corpus studies of historical sociolinguistics. A Fellow of the English Association, Newstok is editing Michel de Montaigne’s educational writings with award-winning translator Tess Lewis. He spoke about this project upon receipt of the 2025 Parnassus Prize, and he is currently teaching a Rhodes seminar devoted to Montaigne’s legacy.
Newstok will continue as executive director of Rhodes’ Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities through Oct. 1, when the center will host Robert Macfarlane’s lecture “Is a River Alive?”