Samford University historian Ginger S. Frost has been accepted as a member at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, N.J. The fellowship award will enable Dr. Frost to spend a sabbatical year at the Institute working on her latest book project, Strangers in Blood: Illegitimacy in England, 1860-1939.

The Institute for Advanced Studies was founded in 1930 and one of its first faculty members was Albert Einstein, who joined the Institute in 1933 and served until his death in 1955. Historian George Kennan and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer are among many noted scholars to have served on its faculty.

Each year the Institute selects about 200 members to receive fellowships from about 1,500 applicants. The Institute expects a member's period in residence to result in work of significance and originality.

Frost is studying in England this summer with the help of a $6,000 stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is the author of three previous books in her field of British history: Victorian Childhoods, published by Praeger Press; Living in Sin: Cohabitating as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth Century England, published by Manchester University Press; and Promises Broken: Courtship, Class and Gender in Victorian England, published by the University Press of Virginia.

In 2002-2003, Frost became the first scholar from Alabama to hold a fellowship at the National Humanities Center in Triangle Park, N.C. A Samford faculty member since 1996, Frost holds the Ph.D. degree from Rice University.