The School of Graduate Studies congratulates UNB alumna Dr. Kelly Chaves (Governor General's Gold Medal Winner, 2020) on the award of an Omohundro Institute-National Endowment for the Humanities (US) post-doctoral fellowship. This prestigious award supports new research to illuminate 17th-and 18-century Indigenous cosmologies of the ocean and show how these understandings led to conflict with Europeans in Ninnimissinouk and Wabanaki country (southern New England, Maine, and Acadia in Euro-centric geographical terms). Chaves expect this research to contribute to debates on Indigenous resource usage and early North American Indigenous history in the coming years. She also believes that this work will provide a new interpretation of the ethnohistoric baseline that will be critical in contemporary Indigenous water rights cases. This research builds on her doctoral dissertation earned through the Department of History in 2019, which also won the American Philosophical Society's Phillip's Fund Award for Native American Research in 2020.

Dr. Chaves is a faculty member at the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics, where she teaches History of the Western Tradition I and II, Native American history, and The American Revolution.