Current Fellows and Their Projects

2018-2019

Mellon Distinguished Scholar

Neal Salisbury, Barbara Richmond 1940 Professor Emeritus in the Social Sciences, Smith College

Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship

Don James McLaughlin, University of Tulsa, Assistant Professor of 19th-Century American Literature, “Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature”

AAS-National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships

Benjamin Bascom, Assistant Professor of English, Ball State University, “Feeling Singular: Masculinity and Desire in the Early Republic, 1786-1822”
Greg Childs, Assistant Professor of History, Brandeis University, “Scenes of Sedition: Racial Politics in Bahia during the Age of Revolution”
Sonia Hazard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College, “The Touch of the Word: Evangelical Cultures of Print in Antebellum America”
Elspeth Martini, Assistant Professor of History, Montclair State University, “Humanitarian Authority and Indigenous Dispossession in the U.S. and British Empires”
Sharon Murphy, Professor of History and Classics, Providence College, “Banking on Slavery in the Antebellum South”
Matthew Suazo, Visiting Assistant Professor in English at Kenyon College. His project is “Wetland Americas: Literature, Race, and the Mississippi River Valley in Translation, 1542-1884”

American Historical Print Collectors Society Fellowship

Erika Pazian, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, “Visual Culture and National Identity during the U.S.-Mexican War”

Alstott-Morgan Fellowship

Adam Laats, Professor of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership, State University of New York, Binghamton, “Toe the Line: Joseph Lancaster and the Delusion of Early School Reform”

AAS-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship

Nicholas Crawford, Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, “Sustaining Slavery: Plantation Provisioning and the Politics of Health in the British Caribbean,
c. 1775-1838”

Stephen Botein Fellowships

Dana Badley, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Aesthetic Sociality and Nineteenth-Century America”
Magdalena Zapedowska, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “Black Dissent and Black Freedom: Revolution, Emigration, Reform, 1850-1870”

Drawn-to-Art Fellowship

Tanya Pohrt, Project Curator, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, “Mary Way and Elizabeth Way Champlain: Miniaturists of the Early Republic”

Jenny d’Héricourt Fellowship

(jointly sponsored by AAS and the French Association for American Studies)

Emilia Le Seven, Ph.D. Candidate in English-Speaking Cultures, Université Paris Diderot, “Cooper’s Sea Romances and the American Grand National Narrative”

Christoph Daniel Ebeling Fellowships

(jointly sponsored by AAS and the German Association for American Studies)

Tatania Prorokova, Adjunct Instructor in American Studies, Philipps-Universität Marburg, “Climate Change, the Environment, and the Industrial Revolution in the U.S.”

David Jaffee Fellowship

Joseph Larnerd, Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Art History, Stanford University, “The Makings of Cut Glass in America, 1876-1916”

The Lapides Fellowship in Pre-1865 Juvenile Literature and Ephemera

Ann Daly, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Brown University, “Hard Money: The Making of a Specie Currency, 1828-1846”

Jay and Deborah Last Fellowships

Joshua Bartlett, Ph.D. Candidate in English, State University of New York, Albany, “The Many Lives of the Charter Oak”
Alex Beringer, Assistant Professor of English, University of Montevallo, “Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century American Comic Strip”
Elizabeth Duquette, Associate Professor of English, Gettysburg College, “Napoleonic Codes: Tyranny and Ubiquity in Nineteenth-Century America”
Lauren Freese, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, University of South Dakota, “A Taste for Images: Depictions of Food and Eating in the American Popular Press”
Julia Grummitt, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Princeton University, “The Great National Work: Visualizing Territory and Race in Nineteenth-Century North America
Lucien Holness, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Maryland College Park, “Between North and South, East and West: The Anti-Slavery Movement in Southwestern Pennsylvania”
Donald Johnson, Assistant Professor of History, Philosophy & Religious Studies, North Dakota State University, “Thirteen Clocks: Popular Statecraft and the Coming of American Independence”
Sandro Jung, Fellow, Herzog August Library, “A Transnational History of American Book Illustration”
Asiel Sepulveda, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, Southern Methodist University, “City Impressions: Lithography and Urban Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Havana”
Rachel Walker, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Maryland, College Park, “A Beautiful Mind: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1780-1870”

Legacy Fellowship

Courtney Buchkoski, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Oklahoma, “Benevolent Colonization: Emigration Aid and the American West, 1820-1880”

Barbara L. Packer Fellowship

(established by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society)

Mark Gallagher, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of California, Los Angeles, “’In the Optative Mood’: Unitarian Optimism and the Transcendental Affects of Peabody, Parker, Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau”

Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowships

Jamie Bolker, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Fordham University, “Lost and Found: Wayfinding in Early American Literature and Culture”
Camden Burd, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Rochester, “The Ornament of Empire: Nurserymen and the Making of the American Landscape”
Nikki Hessell, Associate Professor of English, Victoria University of Wellington, “Sensitive Negotiations: Romantic Literature and Indigenous Diplomacy, 1820-1950”
Peter Jaros, Associate Professor of English, Franklin & Marshall College, “Incorporate Things: A Literary Genealogy of Corporate Personhood in Antebellum America”
Madeline Kearin, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, Brown University, “The Sensory Ecology of the Worcester State Hospital for the Insane”
Trent MacNamara, Assistant Professor of History, Texas A & M University, “Big Sky: Popular Ideas about the Heavens in America”
Kate McIntyre, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Columbia University, “Fugitive Circulations: The Political Ecology of Poetry in Early African-American Newspapers”
Rachael Pasierowska, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Rice University, “Beasts, Birds, and Bondsmen: Animal and Slave Interactions in Atlantic World Slavery”
Dorin Smith, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Brown University, “Brain Fever”
Justin Tackett, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Stanford University, “Investigating the Poetics of American Stethoscopy and Telegraphy”

The Reese Fellowships

Gordon Fraser, Assistant Professor of English, North Dakota State University, “The Hawaiian Creation Chant and the Firm of Lee & Shepard”
Seth Perry, Assistant Professor of Religion, Princeton University, “Lorenzo Dow and the Origins of American Religious Celebrity”

Justin G. Schiller Fellowship

Camille Owens, Ph.D. Candidate in African American Studies, Yale University, “Blackness and the Human Child: Race, Prodigy, and the Logic of American Childhood”

Joyce Tracy Fellowship

Jordan Wingate, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of California Los Angeles, “The Periodical Origins of the American Self”

Fellowships for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers - 2018

William Randolph Hearst Foundation Fellowships

Lisa Bielawa, composer, New York, NY, research on texts that will inspire and inhabit a series
of small works for the violin and voice, focusing around immigration with themes such as: Sanctuary; Asylum; Refuge(e); Amnesty; Shelter; Foreign(er); Alien; Dreamer
Brian Mullin, playwright, London, UK, research for play inspired by the community of freed
African-American slaves who lived freely in an abandoned British garrison in the West Florida territory for a period following the end of the War of 1812

Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowships

TaraShea Nesbit, writer, Oxford, OH, research for novel “Beheld” – the story of the Mayflower pilgrims told through the eyes of two women, Alice Bradford, puritan, and Eleanor Billington, indentured servant
Leila Philip, writer, Woodstock, CT, research for non-fiction book about the experiences of contemporary New England fur trappers, offering a compelling, if startling window through which to reconsider environmentalism

Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship

James Arthur, poet, Baltimore, MD, research for group of poems that will be created in response to holdings in Graphic Arts, including artifacts, the David Claypoole Johnston lithographs, and the Paul Revere engravings

Fellowships for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers - 2019

William Randolph Hearst Foundation Fellowships

Jessica Kahkoska, librettist, Colorado Springs, CO, research for musical, "Agent 355," based on the Culper Spy Ring
David Mills, poet, Long Island City, New York, research for poetry manuscript, History's Whisper, focusing on slavery in Massachusetts and New York

Robert and Charlotte Baron Fellowships

Laurie McCants, actor, Bloomburg, Pennsylvania, research for solo performance about Frances Slocum, who in 1778 was abducted by the Lenape at 5 years of age
Scott Weaver, historical non-fiction writer, Richmond, Virginia, research for book project about the Gabriel Rebellion in Richmond, Virginia

Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, interdisciplinary artist, Providence, RI, research for creation of visual and sonic pieces that explore the business of slavery

For a complete list of all fellows from 1972 to the present, see the Fellows' Directory