Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship

Jay and Deborah Last Fellowships are for research on American art, visual culture, or other projects that will make substantial use of graphic materials as primary sources. The awards are funded from the gift of Jay and Deborah Last.

Application Deadline
Contact Person
Nan Wolverton

Fellows

Date Name Affiliation Position
2025-26 Bethany Bell University of Virginia PhD Candidate in History Hearth and Home: Black Southerners and the Built Environment in the 19th Century
2025-26 Anne Cross Pennsylvania State University Assistant Teaching Professor of American Art Mediating Atrocity: Photography, Violence, and the Civil War Press
2025-26 Victoria S. Kenyon University of Delaware PhD Candidate in Art History Stacking the Deck: Fortune-Telling Cards and American Identity in the Long Nineteenth Century
2025-26 Sarah Pollman Concordia University Montréal PhD Candidate in Communication Studies Archive, Image, Asylum: iconographies of Illness in Shuttered Psychiatric Hospitals
2024-25 Chinaza Amaeze Okoli Eastern Kentucky University Assistant Professor of English Freedom of the Scenes: Performance Cultures and Black Atlantic Literature, 1750-1830
2024-25 Sara E. Lampert University of South Dakota Associate Professor of History Leg Show: Ballet, Burlesque, and Female Spectacle in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age
2024-25 Courtney Murray Pennsylvania State University PhD Candidate in English and African American Studies The Hold: Black Femme Formations of Space, Text, and Being in the Long Nineteenth Century
2023-24 Patricia Johnston College of the Holy Cross Professor of Visual Arts Global Aesthetics
2023-24 Andrea Pappas Santa Clara University Associate Professor of Art and Art History Art and Enslavement in Two Massachusetts Embroideries 1756-1758
2023-24 Kayla Schreiber University of Southern Mississippi Graduate Student of English Black Fugitivity, Disability, and Sexual Deviancy in Nineteenth Century Slave Narratives
2023-24 Hampton Smith Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD Candidate in History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture Making under Slavery in the Black Atlantic World, 1750-1865
2023-24 Todd Nathan Thompson Indiana University of Pennsylvania Professor of English Manifest Jestiny
2022-23 Ryan Bachman University of Delaware PhD Candidate in History 'Done in Canton': Chinese Export Waxworks in American Museums
2022-23 Anders Bright University of Pennsylvania PhD Candidate in History Luck’s Metropolis; Lotteries, Finance, and Class in New York, 1780-1830
2022-23 Julia Carroll Boston University PhD Candidate in American & New England Studies The Protestant Sanctioning of Race-Based Slavery in Language & Landscape in the Anglo-American South, 1739-1791
2022-23 Alexander David Clayton University of Michigan, Ann Arbor PhD Candidate in History The Living Animal: Biopower and Empire in the Atlantic Menagerie, 1760-1890
2022-23 John Patrick M. Fetherston University of Maryland, College Park PhD Candidate in History Taverns, African Americans, and the American Public in the Age of Revolutions
2022-23 Allison Fulton University of California, Davis PhD Candidate in English Disciplining Craft: The Gendered Making of Nineteenth-Century American Science
2022-23 Alexandra Macdonald College of William and Mary PhD Candidate in History The Social Life of Time in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1660-1830
2022-23 Julia Rosenbaum Bard College Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Unruly Bodies?: Portraying Science and Citizenry in Post-Civil War America
2022-23 Merav Schocken University of California, Santa Barbara PhD Candidate in English Material Faith: The Business of Death and the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century America
2022-23 Ben Wright University of Texas, Dallas Associate Professor of Historical Studies Empires of Souls: The United States, Britain, and West African Colonization
2020-21 Rebekah Bryer Northwestern University PhD Candidate in Theater National Acts: Performance, Commemoration, and the Construction of National Identity in the Aftermath of the Civil War
2020-21 Robert Caldwell Southwest Louisiana Technical Community College Assistant Professor of History and Geography Indians in their Proper Place: Social Sciences and the Mapping of Native America
2020-21 Anne Cross University of Delaware PhD Candidate in Art History 'Features of Cruelty Which Could Not Well Be Described by the Pen': The Media of Atrocity in Harper’s Weekly, 1862-1866
2020-21 Alice Crossley University of Lincoln Assistant Professor of English and Journalism Affect and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Valentines
2020-21 Andrea Knutson Oakland University Associate Professor of English Barbados’s Plantation History at the Intersection of Slavery and Ecocide
2020-21 Ryan Tobler Harvard Divinity School PhD Candidate in Religion American Sacraments: Religion and Ritual in the Early United States
2020-21 Rosetta Young Haverford College Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Program The Game of Human Life: Modern cultures of Childhood and Professional Society
2019-20 Zachary Bennett Rutgers University Postdoctoral Fellow in History Flowing Power: Rivers and the Remaking of Colonial New England
2019-20 Marissa Grunes Harvard University PhD Candidate in English This Corner in the Wild: Architectural Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
2019-20 Melanie Hernandez California State University, Fresno Assistant Professor of English Drawing the Border: Mexicans and Mexicanness in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Visual Culture
2019-20 Isabelle Masse McGill University PhD Candidate in Art History Itinerant Portraitists in North America: Mobility, Practice, Transmission, 1776-1812
2019-20 Dina Murokh University of Southern California PhD Candidate in Art History 'A Sort of Picture Gallery': The Visual Culture of Antebellum America
2019-20 Erin Pauwels Temple University Assistant Professor of Art History Napoleon Sarony and the Art of Living Pictures
2019-20 Rebecca Rosen Hollins University Visiting Assistant Professor of English Making the Body Speak: Anatomy, Autopsy, and Testimony in Early America, 1639-1790
2019-20 Rebecca Szantyr Brown University PhD Candidate in History of Art & Architecture Nicolino Calyo: A Wider View of American Art, 1833-1855
2019-20 Eran Zelnik California State University, Chico Lecturer in History Republic of Mirth: Humor, Settler Colonialism, and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850
2019-20 Nathaniel Green Northern Virginia Community College Associate Professor of History The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency
2018-19 Joshua Bartlett State University of New York, Albany PhD Candidate in English The Many Lives of the Charter Oak
2018-19 Alex Beringer University of Montevallo Assistant Professor of English Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century American Comic Strip
2018-19 Lance Boos Stony Brook University PhD Candidate in History The Development of a British Atlantic Musical Marketplace in the Eighteenth Century
2018-19 Lauren Freese University of South Dakota Assistant Professor of Fine Arts A Taste for Images: Depictions of Food and Eating in the American Popular Press
2018-19 Caroline Gillaspie CUNY Graduate Center PhD Candidate in Art History Fueling America: Visual Representations of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Coffee Consumption
2018-19 Julia Grummitt Princeton University PhD Candidate in History The Great National Work: Visualizing Territory and Race in Nineteenth-Century North America
2018-19 Lucien Holness University of Maryland, College Park PhD Candidate in History Between North and South, East and West: The Anti-Slavery Movement in Southwestern Pennsylvania
2018-19 Sandro Jung Herzog August Library Fellow A Transnational History of American Book Illustration
2018-19 Emma Newcombe Boston University PhD Candidate in American & New England Studies A Place Rendered Interesting': Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of Middle-Class Tourism
2018-19 Asiel Sepulveda Southern Methodist University PhD Candidate in Art History City Impressions: Lithography and Urban Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Havana
2018-19 Melissa Trafton University of New Hampshire Adjunct Professor of Art History Animals in the Age of Darwin
2018-19 Rachel E. Walker University of Maryland, College Park PhD Candidate in History A Beautiful Mind: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1780-1870
2018-19 Sarah Gillespie CUNY Graduate Center PhD Candidate in Art History 'One Thing New Under the Sun': The Cross-Currents of Science and Art in the American Daguerreotype, 1839-1850
2017-18 Kathrinne Duffy Brown University PhD Candidate Doctrine of the Skull: Phrenology and Public Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
2017-18 Irene Cheng California College of Arts Assistant Professor The Shape of Utopia
2017-18 Sonia Hazard Duke University PhD Candidate The Touch of the Word: Evangelical Cultures of Print in Antebellum America
2017-18 Elizabeth Hopwood Loyola University Chicago Instructor Eating the Atlantic: Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Caribbean Tables and Texts
2017-18 Helen Hunt Tennessee Technological University Professor of English Provoking Pleasure: Erotic Dominance & Submission in Early American Fiction
2017-18 Leslie McAbee University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill PhD Candidate Exotic Animals and the American Conscience, 1840-1900
2017-18 Rachel Miller University of Michigan PhD Candidate Capital Entertainment: Creative Labor and the Modern State, 1860-1910
2017-18 Whitney Barlow Robles Harvard University PhD Candidate Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History, 1700-1820
2017-18 Erika Schneider Framingham State University Associate Professor Lost in Translation, Found in Print: American Gift Books
2017-18 Hesam Sharifian Tufts University PhD Candidate Americanizing Shakespeare in Print
2017-18 Judith Ridner Mississippi State University Associate Professor Clothing the Babel: The Material Culture of Ethnic Identity in Early America
2016-17 AJ Blandford Rutgers University PhD Candidate Labor and the Visualization of Knowledge in American Geological Surveys
2016-17 Gina Caison Georgia State University Associate Professor of English Feather
2016-17 Paul Fess CUNY Graduate Center PhD Candidate Resonant Texts: The Politics and Practices of Nineteenth-Century African American Music and Print Culture
2016-17 Jean Franzino Macalester College Visiting Assistant Professor of English Freak Show Aesthetics
2016-17 Shawna McDermott University of Pittsburgh PhD Candidate Reading Race: Visual Literacy in Nineteenth-Century American Children's Periodicals
2016-17 Christina Michelon University of Minnesota PhD Candidate Interior Impressions: Printed Material in the Nineteenth-Century American Home
2016-17 Christy Pottroff Fordham University PhD Candidate The Mail Gaze: Early American Literature, Letters, and the Post Office
2016-17 Sarah Schuetze University of Wisconsin, Green Bay Assistant Professor of English Calamity Howl
2016-17 Nora Slonimsky CUNY Graduate Center PhD Candidate 'The Engine of Free Expression'[?]: The Political Development of Copyright in the Colonial British Atlantic and Early National United States
2016-17 Juliet Sperling University of Pennsylvania PhD Candidate Animating Flatness: Seeing Moving Images in American Painting and Mass Visual Culture, 1800-1895
2015-16 Nicole Belolan University of Delaware PhD Candidate Navigating the World: The Material Culture of Physical Mobility Impairment in the Early American North, 1700-1861
2015-16 William Coleman Washington University in St. Louis Postdoctoral Fellow Domestic Bliss: The Artist and the Country House in Nineteenth-Century America
2015-16 Seth Cotlar Willamette University Professor When the Olden Days Were New: A Cultural History of Nostalgia in Modernizing America, 1776-1860
2015-16 Katherine Mintie University of California, Berkeley PhD Candidate Legal Lenses: Intellectual Property Laws and American Photography, 1839-1890
2015-16 Kate Silbert University of Michigan PhD Candidate 'Committed to Memory': Gender, Literary Engagement, and Commemorative Practice, 1780-1830
2015-16 Amy Sopcak-Joseph University of Connecticut PhD Candidate The Lives and Times of Godey's Lady's Book, 1830-1877
2015-16 Whitney Nell Stewart Rice University PhD Candidate Domestic Activism: The Politics of the Black Home in Nineteenth-Century America
2015-16 Christa Vogelius University of Copenhagen Assistant Professor Ekphrasis and the Transnational Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America
2015-16 Rachel E. Walker University of Maryland PhD Candidate A Beautiful Mind: Reading Faces in the Ango-Atlantic World, 1760-1860
2015-16 Clay Zuba University of Delaware PhD Candidate Apess' Eulogy, Narrative Visualcy, and the Shpaes of Sovereignty
2014-15 Anne Anderson Exeter University PhD Candidate in English The Morse Collection
2014-15 Elizabeth Athens Yale University PhD Candidate in Art History Figuring a World: William Bartram's Natural History
2014-15 Lauren Barbeau Washington University in St. Louis PhD Candidate in English 'Worth of a Happier Domestic Fate': Domesticity as the Property of White Women
2014-15 Mary B. Fuhrer Independent Scholar Tuberculosis and Popular Culture in New England, 1820-1840
2014-15 J. Ritchie Garrison University of Delaware Professor in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture Freight and the Commercial Landscapes of the Atlantic World, 1650-1860
2014-15 Heather Kopelson University of Alabama Assistant Professor of History Idolatrous Processions: The Production of Peoples and Places in the Atlantic World
2014-15 Maura Lyons Drake University Associate Professor of Art History Popular Depictions of the 'Natural' Body of the Union Soldier
2014-15 Leila Mansouri University of California, Berkeley PhD Candidate in English Constituent Characters
2014-15 Hilary Miller Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg PhD Candidate in American Studies The National Road and the Expansion of American Culture, 1811-1850
2014-15 Katherine Smoak Johns Hopkins University PhD Candidate in History Circulating Counterfeits: Making Money and Its Meanings in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic
2014-15 Colleen Tripp Brown University PhD Candidate in Afro-American Studies Pacific Sensations: The Beginnings of American Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Popular Culture
2014-15 Douglas Guerra State University of New York, Oswego Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing On the Move: Gaming Models for Literary Theory
2013-14 Caroline Frank Brown University Visiting Scholar Son of Morning: A Chinese Merchant Visits Early Republican America
2013-14 Gordon Fraser University of Connecticut PhD Candidate Transamerican Revolutions: Liberal Nationalism and the Nineteenth-Century Politics of Violence
2013-14 Sarah Gerk Oberlin College Visiting Teacher Irishness in Nineteenth-Century American Music
2013-14 Sonia Hazard Duke University PhD Candidate In and Of the Machine: Religion and Visual Technologies in Antebellum America
2013-14 Robert Lee University of California, Berkeley PhD Candidate Louisiana Purchases: The US-Indian Treaty System in the Missouri River Valley, 1840-1851
2013-14 Christopher Lukasik Purdue University Associate Professor The Image in the Text
2013-14 Brett Mizelle California State University, Long Beach Professor Killing Animals in American History
2013-14 Sarah Perkins Stanford University PhD Candidate Dixie Bound: The Story of an American Literary Movement, 1860-1930
2013-14 Sarah Weicksel University of Chicago PhD Candidate The Fabric of War: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era
2013-14 Mary B. Fuhrer Independent Scholar Tuberculosis and Popular Culture in New England: 1800-1840
2013-14 Zara Anishanslin College of Staten Island Assistant Professor Rebelling Subjects, Revealing Objects: The Material and Visual Culture of Making and Remembering the American Revolution
2012-13 Sarah Beetham University of Delaware PhD Candidate Sculpting the Citizen Soldier: Reproduction and National Memory, 1865-1917
2012-13 Justin Clark University of Southern California PhD Candidate Training the Eyes: Romantic Vision and Class Formation in Boston, 1830-1870
2012-13 Frances Clarke University of Sydney Lecturer Minors in the Military: A History of Child Soldiers from the Revolution to the Civil War
2012-13 Michael D'Alessandro Boston University PhD Candidate Staged Readings: Sensationalism and Audience in Popular American Literature and Theater, 1830-1870
2012-13 Jessica Linker University of Connecticut PhD Candidate 'It is my best wish to behold Ladies among my hearers': Early American Women and Scientific Practice, 1720-1860
2012-13 Mairin Odle New York University PhD Candidate Stories Written on the Body: Cross-Cultural Markings in the North American Atlantic, 1600-1830
2012-13 Alexandra Socarides University of Missouri Assistant Professor The Lyric Pose: Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry and the Problem of Recovery
2012-13 Brian Valencia Yale University PhD Candidate Performance Histories of Nineteenth-Century Extravaganza and Burlesque
2012-13 Brett Grainger Harvard University PhD Candidate The Vital Landscape: Evangelicals and Nature in America, 1740-1870
2012-13 Mazie Harris Brown University PhD Candidate Selling Photography on Broadway, 1839-1884
2011-12 Natalie Deibel George Washington University PhD Candidate 'For Profit, Pleasure, and Sport': Recreation, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800
2011-12 Jeffrey D. Groves Harvey Mudd College Professor A Practical Study of the Isaiah Thomas Press at the American Antiquarian Society
2011-12 Amber LaPiana Washington State University PhD Candidate Mapping Literary Regionalism
2011-12 Anne Verplanck Pennsylvania State University Associate Professor The Graphic Arts in Philadelphia, 1780-1880
2011-12 Dominique Zino CUNY Graduate Center PhD Candidate 'On a Certain Blindness': The Visionary Aesthetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, William James, and Henry James
2011-12 Catherine H. Walsh University of Delaware PhD Candidate in Art History Narrative and Orality in Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture
2011-12 Wendy A. Bellion University of Delaware Associate Professor The Space of Iconoclasm: New York and American Historical Memory
2011-12 Gina Caison University of California, Davis Associate Professor of English 'To the Dear Reader': Rhetorical Audiences and Histories in Boudinot, Simms, and the Antebellum Newspaper
2011-12 Brigitte Fielder Cornell University PhD Candidate Animal Humanism: Abolitionists and Animals in the American Nineteenth Century
2011-12 Matthew Fox-Amato University of Southern California PhD Candidate Exposing Humanity: Photographic Dimensions of American Slavery, Antislavery, and Emancipation, 1840s to 1870s
2011-12 Aston A. Gonzalez University of Michigan, Ann Arbor PhD Candidate Kneeling and Fighting: African American Artists' Depiction of Black Humanity
2010-11 Jessica Collier University of California, Irvine PhD Candidate The Transcendental Classroom: Childhood Education and Literary Culture in Antebellum America
2010-11 Volker Depkat Professor The Visualization of Legitimacy
2010-11 Alison Klaum University of Delaware PhD Candidate Pressing Flowers: American Floral Prints and Preserving Culture in the Nineteenth Century
2010-11 Daniel Lewis Northern Virginia Community College Assistant Professor The Popularity of 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' Prints in the Literary Marketplace, 1853-1861
2010-11 Christopher Oliver University of Virginia PhD Candidate Civic Visions: The Panorama and Popular Amusement in American Art and Society, 1845-1870
2010-11 Anne Roth-Reinhardt University of Minnesota PhD Candidate 'Retouching' American History: Narrative and Graphic Illustrations within Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction
2010-11 Phillip Troutman George Washington University Assistant Professor Abolition Comix: Visual Semiotics in Antislavery Materials
2010-11 Meredith Bak University of California, Santa Barbara PhD Candidate Perception and Playthings: Optical Toys as Instruments of Science and Culture
2010-11 Keri Holt Utah State University Assistant Professor Reading the Federal Republic: Considering the Place of the States in the Early U.S.
2010-11 Hugh McIntosh Northwestern University PhD Candidate Civil War Advertising and the Popular Novel
2010-11 Daegan Miller Cornell University PhD Candidate Witness Tree: Nature, Culture, and Progress in Nineteenth-Century America
2009-10 Radiclani Clytus Tufts University Assistant Professor Envision Slavery: American Abolitionism and the Primacy of the Visual
2009-10 Nenette Luarca-Shoaf University of Delaware PhD Candidate The Place of the Mississippi River in Antebellum Visual Culture and Imagination
2009-10 Whitney Martinko University of Virginia PhD Candidate Progress through Preservation: History on the American Landscape in an Age of Improvement, 1790-1860
2009-10 Lyra Monteiro Brown University PhD Candidate Racializing the Ancient World: Ancestry and Identity in the Early United States, 1760-1860
2009-10 Jennifer Pierce University of Iowa Assistant Professor The Reign of Children: Games and Toys in American Public Libraries
2009-10 Kelly Ross University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill PhD Candidate Marks and Traces: The Prehistory of the Detective Story
2009-10 Jonathan Senchyne Cornell University PhD Candidate 'Bottles of Ink, and Reams of Paper': Racial Mixture and Legibility in Antebellum Illustration
2009-10 Allison M. Stagg University College, University of London PhD Candidate American Political Caricatures: 1787-1825
2009-10 Arden Stern University of California, Irvine PhD Candidate Slanted, Shredded, and Simulated: A Cultural History of the Unruly Typeface
2009-10 Amy Hughes Brooklyn College PhD Candidate 'Thoughts Bodied upon the State': Sensationalism and Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, 1842-1867
2008-09 Carolyn Eastman University of Texas Assistant Professor "Learning to See: Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World."
2008-09 Sarah Gould University of Michigan PhD Candidate Seeing American: The Visual Representation of Race in Early American Children's Literature and Games
2008-09 Kevin Muller University of California, Berkeley Lecturer "An Undergraduate Course on Visual Culture in American Life, 1600-1900"
2008-09 Nancy J. Siegel Juniata College Assistant Professor Bodily Functions as Body Politic: Scenes of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Prints.
2008-09 Robin M. Bernstein Harvard University Assistant Professor Racial Innocence: The Uses of Childhood in U.S. Racial Formation 1852-1930
2008-09 Wendy Katz University of Nebraska, Lincoln Associate Professor The Politics of Art Criticism in the Penny Press, 1833-1862
2008-09 Joseph Stubenrauch Indiana University PhD Candidate Faith in Goods: Religion and the Consumer Revolution
2008-09 Megan Kate Nelson California State University, Fullerton Assistant Professor Flesh and Stone: Ruins and the Civil War
2008-09 Cynthia Patterson University of South Florida, Lakeland Assistant Professor 'Exclusively from Original Designs': The Philadelphia Pictorials and the Graphic Arts
2008-09 Patricia Roylance Syracuse University Assistant Professor Eclipse of Empire
2007-08 Joanna Cohen University of Pennsylvania PhD Candidate "Millions of Luxurious Citizens": Consumption and citizenship in New York and Philadelphia, 1815-1876
2007-08 Joanna Frang Brandeis University PhD Candidate Becoming American on the Grand Tour, 1750-1830
2007-08 Angela George University of Maryland PhD Candidate "The Old World: Unearthing Mesoamerican Antiquity in the Art and Culture of the United States, 1839-1893"
2007-08 Lisa L. Gitelman Catholic University Associate Professor Early Photographs of Words Backwards
2007-08 Jennifer Hughes Emory University PhD Candidate "Telling Laughter: A Cultural History of American Humor, 1830-1900"
2007-08 Patricia Johnston Salem State College Professor Martyrs, Riots, Nuns, and Peasants
2007-08 Michael Komanecky Independent Scholar Carleton Watkins' Photographs of the California Missions
2007-08 Jo-Ann Morgan Coastal Carolina University Assistant Professor "Mammies, Mulattos, and Matriarchs: African American Women in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture"
2007-08 Mary Zundo University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign PhD Candidate Mapping Destiny: Cartography and Nineteenth-Century American Art of the Frontier
2007-08 Lisa Gladman Catholic University Associate Professor Early Photographs of Words Backwards
2007-08 Sarah Anne Carter Harvard University PhD Candidate Object Lessons in Nineteenth-Century America
2007-08 Maurizio Valsania Universita di Torino Associate Professor The Curse of History: Leaders' Distrust of American History, 1783-1828