Arlen Specter Center Fellowships Highlight Senator’s Legacy

Arlen Specter Center Fellowships Highlight Senator’s Legacy

The University has announced two $5,000 fellowships for the purpose of aiding a scholar in the pursuit of research in an area supported by the Arlen Specter Center.

“The fellowships ensure that Specter’s legacy of bipartisan policy-driven legislation continues and serve as a corrective model for today’s contentious political environment,” said Evan Laine, faculty director of the Arlen Specter Center.

Shanin Specter, prominent Philadelphia trial attorney and son of the long-time Pennsylvania senator, and his wife, Tracey, funded the fellowships. The recipients include:

Timothy Welbeck, an attorney and adjunct professor in the Jefferson College of Humanities and Sciences, will research Specter’s work as a basis for analyzing and contextualizing the current criminal justice reform movement that centers on eradicating racial disparities in incarceration.

Charlotte Rosen, a PhD candidate in history at Northwestern University, will reflect on Specter’s anxieties about the government’s insufficient prison capacity and the common historical narrative on the rise of mass incarceration. Her project will focus on the 1970s and 1980s mismatch between Pennsylvania state and local government’s capacity to imprison and its promise to punish.

For their research, the fellows will use the Arlen Specter Collection, which contains Specter’s extensive papers, audiovisuals, photographs and memorabilia documenting his decorated 30-year senatorial career.

In addition to publishing their research, the fellows will present their work at the Specter Center’s Roxboro House Roundtables and Knowledge Exchanges to bolster intellectual discourse and further advance the senator’s legacy, said Karen Albert, Specter Center