Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
The New York Public Library

Fellows 2003-2004

Michael Henry Adams
Race and Place: Who Lived, Worked and Worshipped Where? Documenting New York's African-American Landmarks

Michael Henry Adams is the author of Harlem Lost and Found: An Architectural and Social History, 1795 – 1915 that inspired The Museum of the City of New York's exhibition Harlem Lost and Found and the forthcoming book Style and Grace: Black New Yorkers at Home. He lectures widely and conducts walking tours on architecture, preservation, and the culture of Harlem. During his tenure at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, he will research the architectural and social history of African-Americans in New York City since 1626.


Carol Armstrong
Three Essays on Color

Carol Armstrong is professor of Art and Archaeology and Doris Stevens Professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton University. She is the author of Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 and Manet/Manette: The Difference of Painting. She is currently working on a series of essays on fin-de-siécle art criticism in France on the theme of color as a critical and poetic trope rather than an optical science.


Doron Ben-Atar
Director's Fellow
A Socio-Cultural Portrait of Litchfield Connecticut at the Turn of the 19th Century

Doron Ben-Atar is an Associate Professor of History at Fordham University. Dr. Ben-Atar is the author of The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy (1993); Forbidden Knowledge: Technology Piracy and Intellectual Property in the Early Republic (forthcoming), and editor, together with Barbara B. Oberg of Federalists Reconsidered. Dr. Ben-Atar has recently finished co-writing the memoirs of teenage years spent in the Nazi death camps. He is currently working on a study of the social and cultural history of Litchfield Connecticut.


Maureen Howard
Picture This: The Illustrated Novel in English

Maureen Howard is the author of eight novels including Grace Abounding, Natural History, A Lover's Almanac, the novella collection Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring, an autobiography, and two plays. Her essays and reviews have appeared in many anthologies and publications, such as The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Nation. She currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University. While at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center she will write a series of essays on the illustrated novel beginning with the Victorian novels of Dickens and Thackeray through contemporary novelists such as W.G. Sebald.


Patrick Keefe
Listening In: American Signals Intelligence and Surveillance in a Digital Age

Patrick Keefe is a writer and J.D. Candidate at Yale Law School. The recipient of a Marshall Scholarship, he received graduate degrees in International Relations from Cambridge University and New Media and Information Systems from the London School of Economics. His articles and book reviews have appeared in Legal Affairs magazine and the Yale Journal of International Law. He will spend his time at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center completing a book on Signals Intelligence -- government interception of phone calls and emails for intelligence purposes.


Sheila Kohler
A Novel Based on the Life of the Marquise de la Tour du Pin

Sheila Kohler is the author of four novels The Perfect Place (1989), The House on R Street (1994), Cracks (1999), and Children of Pithiviers (2001), and three collections of short stories. She is the recipient of the O. Henry Prize for her story The Mountain and the Willa Cather Prize for One Girl. Her short stories have appeared in many publications including Ploughshares, Paris Review, and The Quarterly. She is working on a historical novel on the life of the Marquise de la Tour du Pin, a French aristocrat who fled to this country and became a dairy farmer in Albany.


Herbert Leibowitz
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow
A Critical Biography of William Carlos Williams

Herbert Leibowitz is the editor and publisher of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He is the author of Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography and Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry. In recent years, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor at Washington University, St. Louis, and Senior Fulbright Professor of American Poetry at the University of Barcelona. During his fellowship term at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, he will replicate William Carlos Williams' research for In the American Grain and write about the poet's changing perspectives on the origins and faultlines of American culture, history, and language.


Rachel Manley
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow
That Year -- A Novel

Rachel Manley is the author of Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, which won Canada's Governor General's award for nonfiction, and Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers. She has also published several volumes of poetry and is the editor of Edna Manley: The Diaries, a collection of her grandmother's journals. A former Bunting Fellow for Literature at Radcliffe College, she is currently writing a novel based on her fellowship experiences.


Wyatt Mason
Translating the Essais of Michel de Montaigne

Wyatt Mason is a translator and critic. His translation of Arthur Rimbaud's poetical works, Rimbaud Complete, appeared in 2002. I Promise to be Good, his edition of Rimbaud's letters, will be published this fall, and his translation of Dante's La Vita Nuova next year, both from Modern Library. His criticism has appeared in Harper's, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. During his fellowship term at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, he will be working on a new translation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.


Philip Pauly
American Desires for Ecological Independence

Philip Pauly is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he teaches history of science. He is the author of Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey, and Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology. He is writing a history of American horticulture from Thomas Jefferson to the present, with special attention to gardeners' and scientists' desires for the exotic, fears about aliens, and uncertainty about what was native.


Melanie Rehak
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow
Nancy Drew Unbound: The Mysteries Behind America's Girl Sleuth and the Stratemeyer Syndicate

Melanie Rehak is a freelance writer and poet, and Assistant Poetry Editor of The New Republic. Her work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and Paris Review. She is working on a book about Mildred Benson, the original writer of the Nancy Drew Mystery Series, and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, the daughter of series book legend Edward Stratemeyer, who inherited his company in 1930. She will be drawing extensively on the Stratemeyer Syndicate archives for her research, as well as other library collections.


Katherine Russell Rich
The Roar of the Tiger: A Year in India Studying Hindi

Katherine Russell Rich, a writer, is at work on The Roar of the Tigers: A Year In India Studying Hindi, an account of and exploration into language acquisition. Last year, she was a Hindi-language fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies, in Rajasthan. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Sunday Times magazine, and on Salon. She's the author of The Red Devil.


Ned Sublette
The Cultural and Political Context of Cuba, 1952-2002

Ned Sublette is the author of Cuba and its Music: From the First Drum to the Mambo (Chicago Review Press, February 2004), the first of two volumes which narrate the development of Cuban music in the context of the political and cultural history of the island. He has conducted educational workshops in Cuba, written and photographed for various magazines and newspapers, was for seven years senior co-producer of the public radio program Afropop Worldwide, co-founded the record label Qbadisc, and has produced numerous albums.


John Jeremiah Sullivan
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow
The Key of the Fields -- A Novel

John Jeremiah Sullivan has been an editor at the Oxford American magazine, Harper's magazine, and GQ, where he currently works as a Writer-at-Large. His 1999 article "Feet in Smoke" was included in the 2002 Best of the Oxford American anthology, and his piece "Horseman, Pass By" (Harper's, 2002) won the 2003 National Magazine Award for feature writing and the 2003 Eclipse Award for the year's best magazine article about horse racing. It was subsequently expanded into Blood Horses. He is now at work on a non-fiction book about the discovery of prehistoric cave art in the southeastern United States, as well as a novel entitled The Key of the Fields.


Elizabeth Wyckoff
Margaret and Herman Sokol Fellow and Director's Fellow
Prints in History: The Discipline of Print Scholarship, 1600-1800

Elizabeth Wyckoff is a Print Specialist in The New York Public Library's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. She has curated exhibitions for the Library including Netherlandish Prints at The New York Public Library and Dry Drunk: The Culture of Tobacco in 17th- and 18th- Century Europe, and was most recently the co-curator of Poetry of Sight: The Prints of James NcNeill Whistler (1834-1903). She is the co-author of Hard Pressed: 600 Years of Prints and Process, and her Innovation and Popularization: Printmaking and Print Publishing in Haarlem is forthcoming.


Made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, Sue Ann and John Weinberg, The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, William W. Karatz, and additional gifts from Mel and Lois Tukman and Margaret and Herman Sokol.


Class of 2003-2004 Fellows press release

 

th: pro, 09-09-03
updated: 03-19-04