The New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers

Fellows 2000-2001

JONATHAN BUSH: The American Nuremberg Trials, 1946-49
Jonathan Bush is using the papers of the late Telford Taylor and the resources of the Library to write a book about the twelve American Nuremberg Trials. Currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas Law School, Bush has previously held fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has written widely on legal history and is the editor of Learning the Law: Teaching and the Transmission of Law in England 1150-1900 (1999).

JOSEPH CADY: Not to Be Named: Keeping Homosexuality Unspeakable
Joseph Cady has most recently been Visiting Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Utah Medical School and Adjunct Associate Professor of Behavioral Medicine at The Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, CUNY Medical School. From 1988 to 1998, he was Assistant Professor of Literature and Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. He will devote his fellowship to work on a book, Not to Be Named: Keeping Homosexuality Unspeakable, that will survey the notion of homosexuality's "unspeakableness" in the history of sexuality.  He will survey the longevity of the stigma in Western history and analyze its cultural origins, meanings, and consequences.

ILEEN A. DEVAULT: United Apart: Sex, Gender, & the Rise of Craft Unionism, 1887-1903
An Associate Professor of Labor History at Cornell University, Ileen A. DeVault will explore the relations between the sexes in labor unions between 1887-1903. The study will use 54 case studies of strikes in 40 U.S. locations, covering four industries (boot and shoe, clothing, textiles, and tobacco). She will look at how unions in this time period constructed gender and how they used those constructions; the implications for interactions between male and female workers; and how this defined and limited women's participation in the labor movement. Her first book, Sons and Daughters of Labor, was published in 1990.

STEVE C. FRASER: Wall Street: A Cultural History of America's Dream Palace
Author and editor Steve C. Fraser won the 1992 Philip Taft Award for the best book in American Labor History for Labor Will Rule and was nominated for the 1992 National Book Circle Critics Award. Beginning with the American Revolutionary era and continuing through to the present, his fellowship project will trace the cultural history of Wall Street. He will examine the diverse ways in which Wall Street has affected American culture and values. In addition, he will explore the great transformation in the reputation of Wall Street from the early one that mixed fear, awe, and revulsion to one today that welcomes and even celebrates "The Street" and its power.

WALTER FRISCH: Music and Early German Modernism
Walter Frisch, Professor of Music at Columbia University, will spend the fellowship term examining the interactions between music and modernist thought in Austria and Germany during the period 1880-1915. He will explore such diverse topics as naturalism and its relationship to music; Jugendstil as a manifestation of music affecting the other arts; the revival of J.S. Bach as an indicator of musical modernism; strategies of irony as a reaction to Wagner and the past in the fiction of Thomas Mann; and the turn to earlier forms and styles in the works of Strauss and Schoenberg of 1912. In 1985 and 1994, he was the recipient of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Outstanding Book on Music.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Novel: Guatemala, New York City, 19th Century
Francisco Goldman's first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the American Academy of Arts and Letters's Sue Kaufman Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His second novel, The Ordinary Season (1997), made the finalist lists for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Prize, and was named as one of the 100 Best American Books of the Century by The Hungry Mind Review. The fictional characters of Goldman's proposed novel, which is set principally in 19th-century Guatemala, New York, and New England, will find their lives enmeshed at times with those of such historical figures as José Martí and Francisca Aparicio de Barrios.

RACHEL HADAS, Director's Fellow: Poetry Anthologies 1800-2000: Reclamation, Recovery, Perspective; Poetry
Poet Rachel Hadas will work on two projects: one will investigate poetry anthologies published in the last 200 years in England and the United States with an eye to the themes and principles governing the anthologist's choices; the other will be to write her own poems, working on a sequence of poems that engage our literary past. Ms. Hadas, who has taught in the English Department at Rutgers University/Newark since 1981, is an award-winning poet. She received Ingram Merrill Foundation grants in 1976-77 and 1994-95, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988-89.

EIKO IKEGAMI: Civility and Aesthetic Publics: Popular Art and Poetry Circles and the Rise of Commercial Society in Tokugawa Japan
Professor of Sociology and History of the Graduate Faculty at the New School University, Eiko Ikegami is also a Research Associate at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University and a Research Scholar at the East Asian Institute at Columbia University. Her project will investigate the origins and development of Japanese civility and aesthetic tastes in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). She will analyze haiku poetry circles and the tea ceremony schools, the rise of commercial publishing, and the popularity of etiquette and manners manuals, looking at Japan's alternate route to modernity from that taken by the West. Her book, The Taming of the Samurai, won the Best Book on Asia Award from the American Sociological Association.

PHILLIP LOPATE: Covering the Waterfront
A central figure in the recent revival of the personal essay, Phillip Lopate, is the author of Portrait of My Body, Bachelorhood, and Against Joie de Vivre (essays); The Rug Merchant (novel); and Being With Children (educational memoir).  He is also the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and Writing New York: A Literary Anthology.  He holds the Adams Chair in English at Hofstra University.  He will write a book, both scholarly and belletristic, about New York City's waterfront, past, present, and future. Mr. Lopate will explore this territory on foot and through the written record to convey a sense of the port, when it was the greatest seaport in the world, the major source of the region's wealth, to its present transformation for recreational use.

ANNE MENDELSON: Food in New York City, 1870-1920
A freelance writer and editor specializing in culinary subjects and the cookbook reviewer for Gourmet Magazine, Anne Mendelson wrote Stand Facing the Stove, a biography of the authors of The Joy of Cooking. Her study will consider a half century of dramatic occurrences in cooking and eating through the larger context of the sociological and economic developments in the city. She will look at various ramifications, vis-à-vis food, as New York became a global banking and financial center ruled by boom-and-bust cycles, as immigration patterns changed and the city became the national capital of the communications industry, and as demographic and technological changes weakened the agriculture of the area.

CLAUDIA ROTH PIERPONT: Lincoln Kirstein and the Education of America
Claudia Roth Pierpont is an independent scholar and contributing writer for The New Yorker. She holds a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and is the previous recipient of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Studies in Italian Renaissance Art History and the Whiting Writer's Award. Ms. Pierpont has completed a collection of essays, just published by Knopf, entitled Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World. During her fellowship at the Library, she will be working on a comprehensive biography on Lincoln Kirstein, whom she characterizes as "one of the most vitally important figures in the development of the arts in America."

BERNHARD SCHLINK, Director's Fellow
A professor of law at the Humboldt University of Berlin and a practicing judge, Bernhard Schlink is also a novelist. Among his works are Selbs Justiz (1987), Selbs Betrug (1992), and Der Vorleser (1995), which was published in English as The Reader in 1997 and featured as a selection in Oprah's Book Club, and Liebesfluchten (2000). He has also published several works of nonfiction pertaining to his field of constitutional law. A native of Bielefeld, Germany, Mr. Schlink was a professor at Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms University in Bonn and at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt. Mr. Schlink will be working on a new novel and also on a scholarly piece that will deal with both law and utopia.

COLM TOIBIN: The Old Lady
Irish novelist and journalist Colm Tóibín, whose work has garnered much critical praise, is the author of three works of fiction that make up a loose trilogy: The South (1990); The Heather Blazing (1992), for which he won the E.M. Forster Prize, American Academy of Arts and Letters; and The Blackwater Lightship (1999). He has also published a variety of travelogues, many on his native Ireland. His recent research about the Irish famine and the role of Sir William Gregory, who was responsible for legislation that caused the ruin of many during the famine, led to his current project: a novel, The Old Lady, about Lady Gregory, who became one of the chief architects of cultural nationalism in Ireland.

SERINITY YOUNG: Gender, Biography and Buddhism
Serinity Young is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Young, who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, has lectured and taught extensively at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, and Hunter College. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, she has written several books, including Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery and Practice. Dr. Young's current study of religious representations of men and women in South Asian Buddhism focuses on ancient and medieval biographies in Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan. In her research, she will use the Library's Oriental Division.

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