UMD Graduate Student Wins Miller Center National Fellowship

ARHU graduate student Robert Henderson, department of history, wins a national fellowship.

ARHU graduate student Robert Henderson, department of history, wins a national fellowship.
ARHU Robert Henderson, Ph.D. candidate in History, received a 2011-12 Miller Center National Fellowship for his project "Dream Deregulated: The Transformation of Housing Finance, 1968-1985." 

Henderson is one of the nine promising young scholars to win fellowships this year from The Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. 

He will receive a one-year $20,000 grant to support his research and writing.  He will also be guided by a "dream mentor," a leading national scholar in his field, and take part in workshops to learn how to reach a broader audience in his work.

His project investigates federal housing policy and policymaking from the Fair Housing Act of 1968 through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and the deregulation of housing finance in the early to mid 1980s. It argues that the deregulation of housing finance undermined the intent of earlier civil rights and community reinvestment policies by integrating housing finance with other capital markets and by shifting from local depository institutions to secondary markets as the main source of capital for financing housing.  It argues that a populist push for the rights of small saver/investors to a market return on savings drove the politics of financial deregulation.

The Miller Center's fellowship program has helped launch the careers of more than 100 scholars in 12 years.