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.

"Dr. Frost's membership at the Institute is another testament to her status as a world-class scholar," said Dr. David W. Chapman, dean of Samford's Howard College of Arts and Sciences.

Frost recently published two peer-reviewed books with academic presses in her field of British history. Victorian Childhoods, a study of the experiences of children growing up in Britain during Victorian times, is part of the "Victorian Life and Times" series by Praeger Press. Living in Sin: Cohabitating as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth Century England, which researches how the courts dealt with the unions of hundreds of couples of common law marriages, is part of the "Gender in History" series of Manchester University Press.

Frost has published articles in scholarly journals and spoken frequently at conferences in the U.S. and Europe. She is past president of the Southern Conference on British Studies.

A Samford faculty member since 1996, she holds the Ph.D. degree from Rice University.