University of Richmond Professor Awarded VFIC Fellowship For Digital Humanities Research on Cold War Philanthropy

UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND — Timothy Barney, a professor of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Richmond, has been awarded the 2025 Mednick Memorial Fellowship from the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges.

The fellowship encourages the professional development of teachers at VFIC member schools and provides a stipend to assist with scholarship and research.

The Mednick Fellowship will support Barney’s work on the digital humanities project Mapping the Ford Foundation: U.S. Philanthropy in a Cold War World, 1952-1991.

A collaboration between Barney, history professor Nicole Sackley, and the Digital Scholarship Lab, Mapping the Ford Foundation visualizes international grants given by the foundation during the Cold War.

“The Ford Foundation was the largest private foundation for much of the 20th century,” said Barney. “During the Cold War, it had to navigate the realities of global politics while trying to establish programs all over the world, and it could do things that the U.S. government could not. I’m grateful to the VFIC for their support of our research, enabling a deeper exploration of how U.S. philanthropy influenced international development during this crucial period.”

Richmond students will be a major part of Mapping the Ford Foundation, helping to build the database for the maps and visualizations, process archival research, and edit content. The finished tool will be available in 2026 for use in interdisciplinary classrooms.

Barney has been teaching at UR since 2011. He is the author of Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America's International Power.

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