Dr. Jessica DeJohn Bergen Receives Two Research Awards 

McNeese State University assistant professor of history, Dr. Jessica DeJohn Bergen, has received two awards to further her research for her upcoming book, Unbecoming Acadian. They are the Frank Hideo Kono Fellowship from The Huntington Library, one of the world’s great independent research libraries located in California; and the J.Y. Sanders Research Scholar Award from Southeastern Louisiana University. 

The book will follow how Acadians in Louisiana built their social, cultural and political identities across the Antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction and New South periods, eventually becoming the people now referred to as Cajun.  

Bergen says the book will push back against familiar images of South Louisiana as simply “Cajun Country” or “Acadiana” by showing that those identities were forged through real struggles over race, gender and belonging. At a time when Americans are grappling with debates over how race and history are taught in schools and whose stories get told in public life, she hopes her research returns to the historical roots of those unresolved questions. 

The Huntington fellowship gives Bergen a month to dig into collections that shed light on how national narratives about the South shaped and were shaped by local identities like that of the Acadians, while the Sanders award supports research at the Center for Southeast Louisiana Studies at Southeastern, which holds archival materials essential to understanding Acadian life at the regional level.  

“Between the two, I can work at both ends of the scale the book requires: the national story and the deeply local one,” she said.