There aren’t many places where a new employee who just started a full-time job would be permitted to immediately take off four months to live seven states away and dive into work on a personal project.
But at Florida Gulf Coast University, Jeff Perry’s somewhat-awkward request not only was granted, it was embraced and celebrated.
That’s because Perry, just hired this academic year on a nine-month contract as visiting assistant professor of history in the Department of Social Sciences, had barely unpacked his Tampa Bay Rays bobblehead and other office belongings in Modular 1 on the south side of campus when he learned he had been awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The fellowship will enable Perry, who teaches three history courses at FGCU, to do more extensive research on a book manuscript he’s writing about the role of churches as judicial tribunals in the early days of the American West.
“I just found out about the fellowship in September, and I’m really grateful to my college and my department program leader (Dr. Nicola Foote) for being so flexible,” he said. “It’s a bit unorthodox, but they’ve been very supportive in rearranging my schedule. Some schools, some departments just wouldn’t allow something like this.”
The Library Company, America’s oldest library founded 285 years ago by the nonpareil Benjamin Franklin himself in Philadelphia, contains more than 500,000 rare books and graphics relating to the history of America and the Atlantic world in the 17th through 19th centuries. In fact, the Library of Congress was located there from the revolutionary years through the 1800s before it was moved to Washington, D.C. The prestige of having a new faculty member selected to study at this historical mecca — through a fellowship that’s awarded to fewer than 5 percent of applicants, nonetheless — isn’t lost on Foote, professor of Latin American history and chair of Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. She’s “proud and delighted” with Perry’s accomplishment.
“These awards typically go to scholars from the Ivy League, so for Jeff to have one while representing FGCU is fantastic and underlines our growing international reputation for producing cutting-edge scholarship in the humanities and social sciences,” Foote said. “Many institutions would have told a visiting faculty member that they had to choose between the fellowship and his position, and in fact, Jeff expected that would happen, and told me he would choose FGCU. However, there was never any question that we would support him in taking advantage of this amazing opportunity.”
Perry’s a Sarasota native who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at the University of South Florida and his Ph.D. in the subject at Purdue, where he graduated in 2015. He taught there during the 2015-16 academic year before coming to FGCU in July.
He first became fascinated in middle school with books about World War II and Vietnam, and his love for history has branched into the subject of the work he hopes to get published by 2019 — an expansion of his dissertation that analyzed how in many Western frontier territories, the community church would serve as judge and jury for neighborhood spats in the absence of a formal judicial process.
“I became interested in how individuals resolved disputes in the 1780s and 1790s, when there wasn’t a strong presence of courthouses, or even the law as we think of it now,” Perry said. “I found a number of church record books that show instances of how the church and state interacted on the local level. For instance, if you lived in Frankfort, Ky., in 1801 and had an issue with your neighbor who didn’t fulfill his contract or stole something off your property, you took it to the church to decide the case. This practice of church discipline, as they call it, sort of vanishes by the 1840s and ’50s, or at least slows down.
“Then I look at church property disputes in which congregations split apart — one segment wants to follow this doctrine, another wants to follow this one, and you have a judge trying to split church property and figure out who’s a real Baptist and who isn’t.”
Although Perry grew up just a two-hour drive north of FGCU, he’d never been to the campus before he was hired. “One thing I noticed since day one is there seems to be a close community here among the instructors from various disciplines,” he said. “Everyone’s excited about what they do, and they want to help you. As for the students, in my three courses, they seem really engaged and responsible; they don’t expect to have things given to them. I haven’t seen that at other institutions.”
While man does not live by thirst for historical knowledge alone, Perry won’t have much time to munch on Philly’s famous cheesesteaks or root for the Eagles (the city’s NFL team, not FGCU’s athletes) during his February-through-May mission in the city of Brotherly Love and Rocky Balboa. This isn’t a “working vacation.” While FGCU gave its scholar-on-the-move its blessing, the university is still taking full advantage of Perry’s teaching talents in spring 2017.
“We have worked to put his spring classes online and to add a class for him that meets in a condensed semester session in the first part of the spring, similar to the summer sessions,” Foote said. “This way he can meet the needs of our students while also getting to participate in this high-level research experience. To me, this is The FGCU Effect in action: Students get to work with a scholar on the cutting edge of his field, our faculty are supported in meeting their professional goals, and everyone wins.”