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Humanities and Social Sciences Library
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Past Fellows: 1999-20071999 Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 1999Sven Beckert Sven Beckert, Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University, is a recent recipient of the Aby-Warburg Foundation prize for academic excellence and a fellow-ship from the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard. He has written and lectured extensively and internationally on business, economic, and labor history. Merchants in the Atlantic World During the Age of Revolution will examine how an economically and socially integrated, cosmopolitan, internationalist, and liberal merchant community emerged and influenced the promulgation of liberal thought between the years 1770 and 1850.
Paul
Berman Political and cultural critic, journalist, and intellectual historian, Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias:The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 and a children's book called Make-Believe Empire. He is also the editor of two readers, Blacks and Jewsand Debating P.C. A former MacArthur Fellow, Village Voice columnist, and New Yorker staff writer, he is a frequent contributor to such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. Mr. Berman's current project is a unique study of the dynamic relationship between Nicaragua's literary traditions and its political left that resulted in the Sandinista revolution of 1979.
D.
Graham Burnett D. Graham Burnett, former Mellon Fellow in History at Columbia University, is an historian of science. His primary research examines the role of the geographical sciences in European colonialism, but he has also worked on Charles Darwin, the history of exploration, and 17th-century optics. His first book, El Dorado on Paper, will be published by the University of Chicago Press next year. He will use the fellowship to do a close examination of a range of 16th- and 17th-century maps in the Library's collections, part of a larger project on the relationship between maps and clocks, the two fundamental artifacts for thinking about the two fundamental axes of human experience: space and time. Mr. Burnett was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was awarded the 1999 Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Economist, The American Scholar and the Times Literary Supplement. In the autumn of 2000 Mr. Burnett will join the faculty of the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma.
Kathleen
Neal Cleaver The first woman on the Black Panthers' central committee and former wife of Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Neal Cleaver was at the center of much of the tumultuous political activity of 1960s America. Now a lawyer and Visiting Professor of Public Policy at Sarah Lawrence, she is writing a memoir spanning the time of her family's move from Alabama to India in the 1950s, through the subsequent years of revolution and exile, and concluding with her enrollment in Yale Law School in the 1980s. Professor Cleaver has lectured at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Emory University School of Law, and was Judicial Clerk for the Hon. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals. She is the recipient of fellowships from The Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University, and The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Pamela
Clemit Dr. Pamela Clemit is currently Reader in English at the University of Durham, UK, and holder of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Her publications include The Godwinian Novel (Oxford English Monographs). She has edited five volumes in The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, one volume in The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, and two volumes in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, all in the Pickering Masters series. She has also published paperback editions of Godwin's St. Leon (Oxford) and Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (Penguin). Her volume on Godwin in the Pickering & Chatto series, Lives of the Great Romantics, was published in June 1999. During her fellowship at the Library she will be working on an intellectual biography of Godwin for Oxford University Press. Using archival resources in the Library's Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, she will produce the first comprehensive study of Godwin's life, works, and contexts across the full six decades of his literary career.
Andrew
Delbanco Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, writes frequently on American culture and as a literary critic for many national journals and papers including The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, and The Puritan Ordeal. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope will be published in October by Harvard University Press. Melville's World, to be written under the auspices of a joint fellowship with The American Council of Learned Societies, will propose that its subject was not only a prose master but also the most vivid and intelligent witness of his times. Andrew Delbanco is Vice President of PEN American Center, a Trustee of the National Humanities Center, and a member of the Society of American Historians.
Gregory
K. Dreicer Gregory K. Dreicer is on the faculty of the Center for New Design in the Parsons School of Design. At the Library, he will focus on Architecture of Segregation, a book, traveling exhibition, and Internet and film project. It will explore how racial attitudes shaped the urban, suburban, and rural environments that reinforce divisions between whites and blacks in American society. Dr. Dreicer has created exhibitions and publications including Between Fences, a cultural history of fences and land use, and Barn Again!, an examination of barns, agriculture, and contemporary society, which is currently touring the United States. He was recently a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Senior Fellow at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution.
Christian
Fleck Christian Fleck, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Graz, Austria, is working on a comprehensive history and sociology of the acculturation and influence of the several hundred social scientists who were forced to leave Europe during the 1930s. A much-published writer and editor in the social and political sciences, Dr. Fleck has served as lecturer at the University of Vienna and at the University of Salzburg, and was a recent Fulbright and Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard University.
Anthony
Holden Author and journalist Anthony Holden has recently completed a life of Shakespeare, which follows noted biographies of subjects including Sir Laurence Olivier, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Prince Charles. His eclectic writings extend from translations of classical poetry and opera librettos to a book on professional poker playing. A contributor to publications including Punch, New Statesman, Spectator, and National Geographic, Mr. Holden was previously staff writer and Atticus columnist for The London Sunday Times. During his Fellowship at the Library, he will use the Carl H. Pforzheimer collection of Shelley and His Circle to research the first full-scale biography of the poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), which has been commissioned by Little, Brown.
Ada
Louise Huxtable Ada Louise Huxtable is an architectural historian and critic who served as Architecture Critic of The New York Times from 1963 to 1982. As the first person to hold the position on an American newspaper, she established the journalistic coverage of architecture, preservation, and the urban environment and received the first Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. She has been a Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981. Currently she is the Architecture Critic of The Wall Street Journal. Her books include Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?; Kicked a Building Lately?; Architecture, Anyone?; and most recently, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion. She will devote her Fellowship to investigating the work of a younger generation of American architects who are exploring new ideas and directions in design.
Marion
Kaplan Marion Kaplan, Professor of History at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is a social and cultural historian, with an emphasis on women's history. Dr. Kaplan's writings include The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Juedischer Frauenbund, 1904?1938; When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (editor); The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History (editor); The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany; and most recently Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, which won the National Jewish Book Award for 1998. She will work on two projects during her fellowship residency, Ordinary Jews and Ordinary Germans: 1933?1941 and Daily Life of Jews in Imperial Germany.
Allen
Kurzweil Allen Kurzweil was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta for his first novel, A Case of Curiosities, published in 1992. The journalist-turned-fiction-writer is currently at work on a second novel, set in a research institution with special collections that mirror those found in The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Mr. Kurzweil is the previous recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Youth Grant Fellowship. He lives in Massachusetts.
Howard
Markel Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases and Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. In addition to numerous articles for publications ranging from The Lancet to The Washington Post, Dr. Markel is the author of Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892; The Practical Pediatrician: The A to Z Guide to Your Child's Health, Behavior and Safety; The Portable Pediatrician; and The H.L. Mencken Baby Book. A practicing pediatrician, Dr. Markel is the recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award and the Shannon Director's Award of the National Institutes of Health. In 1999, he was named a Centennial Historian of the City of New York. He will devote his fellowship to a study of the interactions of American immigration, nativism, and public health over the past 120 years.
Francine
Prose Francine Prose is the author of nine novels, two story collections, and the recent collection of novellas, Guided Tours of Hell. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, and other publications. She writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal. The winner of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, two NEA grants, and a PEN translation prize, she has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. A film based on her novel Household Saints was released in 1993. Ms. Prose's other novels include Judah the Pious, Bigfoot Dreams, Primitive People, and A Peaceable Kingdom.
Harvey
Sachs Independent scholar Harvey Sachs was a professional conductor for a dozen years before dedicating himself exclusively to writing. His books include the biographies Toscanini and Rubinstein: A Life and Virtuoso, an examination of the careers of nine celebrated instrumentalists; and Music in Fascist Italy. He co-authored the memoirs of Placido Domingo and Sir Georg Solti, and his writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications. He has previously held a Guggenheim Fellowship. Mr. Sachs has been commissioned by Knopf to prepare the first volume of Toscanini's correspondence ever undertaken, and he is doing this with the cooperation of the Toscanini family. The great part of this correspondence is in the Library's collections.
Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 2000André Aciman André Aciman is Visiting Associate Professor in French at Bard College. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997-98 and a Whiting Writers' Award in 1995. This memoir, a sequel to his 1995 memoir Out of Egypt, will cover the three years that the narrator, now an adolescent, lived with his mother in Rome. It will tell the story of a Jewish family suddenly forced to face poverty in a country where it is no more at home than it was in Egypt. He has a Ph.D in comparative literature from Harvard and is the authorof False Papers, his forthcoming volume of essays on exile and memory. Jonathan Bush 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 2001Jeffery Renard Allen An associate professor in the English Department at Queens College of the City University of New York and an instructor in the graduate writing program at the New School for Social Research, Allen is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Rails Under My Back, the forthcoming short story collection, Shadowboxing, and two collections of poetry. He will use his time at the center to research his second novel, Hour of the Seeds, an intergenerational story that follows an African-American family 100 years into the past and 100 years into the future. Andrea Barrett The author of five novels and a collection of stories, Ship Fever, which received the 1996 National Book Award, Barrett’s historical fiction often focuses on natural history, medicine and cross-cultural exploration. For a new novel, she will research public health policy and other issues that affected the treatment of New York City’s Lower East Side immigrants with tuberculosis during the first years of World War I. She is the recipient of a 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1992 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. Carmen Boullosa Boullosa is the author of the novel, Leaving Tabasco, among other books including plays, collections of poetry and essays. She plans to research classic Latin American poets for a book that will explain the significance of their art to non-Hispanic readers. The book will examine the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Césár Vallejo, Ramón López Velarde, Delmira Agustini, Rubén Darío and others. A resident of Mexico, her work has been translated into English, French, Italian, German and Dutch. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1992. Maarten Brands Brands, a Dutch historian and expert on international relations, writes extensively on modern history. At the Center he will do research for a collection of essays on continuity in periods of rapid change. A professor at the University of Amsterdam, he is on the boards of the Carnegie Foundation and the Hague Academy of International Law. Claudine Cohen An associate professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Cohen’s areas of research include the history of paleontology, prehistoric archaeology and evolutionary biology. She has written several books and numerous papers in those subject areas. She will use her time at the Center to research a book on the representations of prehistoric women. Her fellowships include the Fulbright Foundation, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Thadious Davis Davis, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of several books including Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled and Faulkner’s ‘Negro’: Art and the Southern Context. Davis received the Anna Julia Cooper Award for Feminist Scholarship from Spelman College and was a DuBois Institute Fellow at Harvard University among many other honors. Her research at the Center will focus on how early film techniques influenced the storytelling styles of certain fiction writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Mark Doty Doty, a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, has published seven collections of poetry and three nonfiction works. His Center research will focus on "animals...as exemplars of otherness and as vessels of human feeling" for a collection "centering on animals as sources of instruction, metaphor and mystery." He will also work on a series of essays that examines humans relationships with animals. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 1987 and 1995; a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship; and a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Writers Award in 2000. Laura Engelstein Engelstein, a professor of history at Princeton University, writes extensively on Russian culture and politics. Her research at the Center will focus on a new project, Modernity By Design: Old and New in Russian Cultural Politics, 1905 -1917. Other awards and fellowships from 1993 through 1998 include the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for her book, Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia; the National Humanities Center; and the Guggenheim Foundation. A.M. Homes Homes is the author of the novels Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In the Country of Mothers, Jack, and the short story collection The Safety of Objects, along with the artist book Appendix A. Her work has been translated into 10 languages and is much anthologized. Her fiction and non-fiction appear frequently in magazines including Art Forum, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. She is contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb, and Blind Spot. Her Center research will focus on two projects: a memoir about adoption and its shifting role in the United States during the past 50 years; and a novel, The Big Idea, a multigenerational portrait of American life that explores the damage from a culture based on consumption and competition. She lives in New York City. Susan Jacoby The author of seven books, Jacoby began her career in 1965 as a reporter for The Washington Post. Since 1972, she has been a freelance writer, contributing articles, essays, and book reviews to numeous newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, and Modern Maturity. Her research, for a nonfiction book, will focus on the ways in which antireligious dissent has been marginalized in American political and social discourse from the early 1900s until the present. Other books by Jacoby include Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for her Family's Buried Past, and Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, which was shortlisted for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Jacoby lives in New York City. Douglas Morris Morris, an associate attorney in the Federal Defender Division of the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, will use his time at the Center to research the life and work of Max Hirschberg, who defied conservatives, reactionaries, and Nazis in court. As Hirschberg litigated these politically charged cases, he also fought to reverse criminal convictions of innocent defendants. Morris plans to use the biography as a means of exploring the problem of miscarriages of justice in Western democracies. Josip Novakovich Novakovich, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, will focus on a historical novel about Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian factory workers in New York City and Cleveland in the early 20th Century. Born in Croatia, he moved to the United States at the age of 20 and has published several short story collections including Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters and a collection of narrative essays, Apricots From Chernobyl. His work was anthologized in the 1997 edition of Best American Poetry and the 1998 edition of The O. Henry Awards. He has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1999 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Carla Peterson Peterson is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Program at the University of Maryland with an expertise in 19th Century African-American literary culture. During the fellowship term, she will use the library’s collections to research New York City’s social history and the institutions that affected the lives of the city’s African-American elite from 1830 to 1930. Peterson will use her findings to write a narrative work in which her own "family stories serve as a window onto a broader social panorama." Peterson is the author of two books, including Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) which she developed while a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and numerous articles on African-Americans, women, history and literature. David Waldstreicher Waldstreicher is an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. His research topic is a re-examination of Benjamin Franklin’s life, thought and politics in the context of Franklin’s behavior, attitudes and writings with regard to slavery. The professor has written extensively on various aspects of American history including two books and numerous articles on nationalism, slavery and the American Revolution. Mike Wallace In 1998, Wallace, a history professor at City University’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Edwin G. Burrows, published a 1,383-page comprehensive and critically acclaimed account of New York City. The book, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, won the Pulitzer, Brendan Gill and New York Society Library prizes. Wallace’s Center research will focus on Gotham II, which will take the story through the 20th century, synthesizing the work of recent scholars, supplemented with original research and "presented in a clear, narrative form." He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 2002Donald Antrim Donald Antrim is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and most recently, The Verificationist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, which has named him one of 20 Writers for the 21st Century, Harpers, and The Paris Review. He is the recent recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. During his fellowship term at the Center he will be working on his fourth novel. Thomas Bender Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. His books include, Toward an Urban Vision, Community and Social Change in America, New York Intellect, and Intellect and Public Life. He has edited The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, City and Nation, and Rethinking American History for a Global Age. His newest book, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea is to be published later this year. His current project seeks to reframe the narrative of American history avoiding the all too common isolation -- past and present -- of the United States from the larger histories it shares with other societies.
Emily Braun is Professor of Art History at Hunter College and teaches at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism, and co-author of Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, and Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today Murals. Ms. Braun has published in Art in America, Modernism/modernity and the Journal of Contemporary History and is a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford Short History of Italy. She will work on a book about Jewish Women and their salons from the 1780s through the mid-20th century as a privileged site of female power that bridged the private and public spheres. Tom Buk-Swienty Tom Buk-Swienty is a journalist and United States Bureau Chief for the Danish weekly Weekendavisen, Berlingske. His bestselling book AmerikaMaxima: Et dansk roadtrip gennem Clinton's USA (AmerikaMMaxima: A Danish Roadtrip through Clinton's USA) has been called the best Danish book on America in the 90s. During his fellowship year at the Center, he will work on a biography of the Danish-American reporter, photographer, and social reformist, Jacob A. Riis. Elisheva Carlebach Elisheva Carlebach is Professor of History, Queens College, CUNY, and the author of Divided Souls: Jewish Converts to Christianity in Early Modern German Lands, 1550-1750, and The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies, which won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish History in 1991. Her project will analyze strategies of Jewish resistance to Christian culture in early modern Central Europe. Caleb Crain Caleb Crain is a freelance writer and was a reporter for the magazine Lingua Franca from 1997 to 2001 and a senior editor there in 1999 and 2000. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, Newsday, The Nation, and The New Republic and is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation. He has written introductions to forthcoming Modern Library editions of two early American novels, Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown and The Algerine Captive by Royall Tyler. Paul Freedman Paul Freedman is Professor of History at Yale University. He has written books on serfdom in Catalonia (The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia, 1991) and on how peasants were portrayed and thought about in medieval Europe as a whole (Images of Medieval Peasant, 2000). During his fellow term at the Center he will work on a book about spices in the Middle Ages and why they were considered so valuable. Bei Ling Huang Bei Ling Huang, poet and essayist, is the founder and editor of Tendency, an exile literary journal founded in late 1993 and published in Chinese. He is also the Executive Director of the Independent Chinese PEN Center and is on the board of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, and Research Associate at Harvard University Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. Roger Keyes Roger S. Keyes is Visiting Professor in the History of Art at Brown University, an Associate in Research at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and Director of the Center for the Study of Japanese Prints. His many publications include The Theatrical World of Osaka Prints with Keiko Mizushima, The Art of Surimono, and The Male Journey in Japanese Prints. He has just completed a catalogue raisonnée of the prints of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Japan Foundation. During his Fellowship year, Dr. Keyes will be studying the Spencer Collection of Japanese illustrated books and beginning a book to accompany an important exhibition of this material at The New York Public Library in 2005. Franziska Kirchner Franziska Kirchner, a German art historian, is the author of Central Park, a book about the impact of German garden theory and practice on the design of New York's Central Park, to be published shortly. She is an independent scholar and longtime coordinator of artists' competitions for memorials in Berlin. At the Center she will use the collections to research antebellum Americans' travels to Germany and their interest in the potential of painting and education to strengthen the American national identity. Caryl Phillips Novelist Caryl Phillips is the author of The Final Passage, for which he won the Malcolm X prize, A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River, and The Nature of Blood. His many awards include a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award. He is also the author of several plays, screenplays, numerous reviews and articles and three works of non-fiction, The European Tribe, for which he won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, The Atlantic Sound, and A New World Order: Selected Essays. He is the editor of an anthology of English Literature written by British authors not born in Britain, Extravagant Strangers, and an anthology of writing about tennis, The Right Set. He is Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University. Stacy Schiff Stacy Schiff is the author of Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, a finalist for the l995 Pulitzer Prize. Her Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography. She is at work on a portrait of Benjamin Franklin in France during the American Revolution. Ms. Schiff has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and The American Scholar, among other publications. She is the previous recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Philip Steinberg Philip Steinberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University. He is the author of The Social Construction of the Ocean, as well as the author of journal articles ranging in topic from the history of ocean law to the role of ideology in New England mill village architecture, and from the political economy of global Internet governance to the sense of place held by activists opposing long-distance water transfers. At the Center for Scholars and Writers, he will utilize The New York Public Library's extensive cartographic holdings to study how the mapping of marine space during the 15th through 18th centuries contributed to the formation of the territorial state as a political-geographic norm. Jeremy Treglown Jeremy Treglown was Editor of the (London) Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1990, and since 1993 has been a professor of English at the University of Warwick, England, where he currently holds a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. His most recent book, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green, was described in the New York Times as "a model of what literary biography should be." He has written for The New Yorker and Grand Street, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton, the California Institute of Technology, and All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Julia Van Haaften Julia Van Haaften was the first Curator of Photographs in The New York Public Library's Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs and is currently the Assistant Director of the Digital Library Program. She has curated many exhibitions for the Library and other institutions and is the author of numerous publications including the books Berenice Abbott: Photographer, A Modern Vision and From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography. As a Fellow of the Center, she will complete a biography of Berenice Abbott for publication by Simon & Schuster. Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 2003Michael Henry Adams Carol Armstrong Doron Ben-Atar Maureen Howard Patrick Keefe Sheila Kohler Herbert Leibowitz Rachel Manley Wyatt Mason Philip Pauly Melanie Rehak Katherine Russell Rich Ned Sublette John Jeremiah Sullivan 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 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. Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 2004Hilary Ballon Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 2005Charlotte Bacon Brent Hayes Edwards Robert Jenkins Wendy Lesser Lucy McDiarmid Jill McDonough Andrew Meier—Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow Mary Morrissy Joseph O’Connor Samuel Roberts Raymond Scheindlin Rebecca Read Shanor Kirk Davis Swinehart—Gilder Lehrman Fellow in
American History Judith Walkowitz Edmund White Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 2006Mohammed Naseehu Ali David W. Blight , Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History Sharon Cameron Will Eno Clive Fisher Farah Jasmine Griffin Maya Jasanoff Carla Kaplan Ben Katchor James Miller James Shapiro Laurie Sheck Nelson Alexander Smith Jeff Talarigo Sean Wilentz , Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow Fellows and Their Topics for Academic Year 2007 James Cook James W. Cook is Associate Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. His books include The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum; The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader; and a forthcoming co-edited collection, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History. At the Cullman Center, he will be writing a book about black performers and the rise of the international entertainment market. Joanne Freeman Joanne Freeman teaches Revolutionary and early national American history
at Yale University. She is the author of Alexander Hamilton: Writings, and Affairs
of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, which won the Best
Book prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
A trustee of the National Council for History Education, she speaks frequently
at public programs and teaching institutes, consults for the National Park
Service, and is a regular contributor to documentaries on PBS, the History
Channel, and the BBC. Her work at the Cullman Center will be on a book
about violence in Congress before the Civil War. Nell Freudenberger Nell Freudenberger’s collection of stories, Lucky Girls, won
the PEN/Faulkner Malamud award for short fiction. Her stories have been
published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta and
The Best American Short Stories, 2004. She won a Whiting Writers’ Award
in 2005; her first novel, The Dissident, was published in 2006;
and she was included in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists,
2007. While at the Cullman Center, she will be working on a novel
about two couples who take a honeymoon in Bangladesh. Joel Kaye Joel Kaye is a Professor of History at Barnard College. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, a 2006 MacArthur Foundation Fellow,
is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and many
other publications, writing primarily about issues related to families
and poverty. Her first book, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble
and Coming won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Brendan Gill Prize,
and the Ron Ridenhour Award, among others. Her current project, Give
It Up, concerns the lives of standup comedians and will be published
by Random House. Louis Menand, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow Louis Menand is Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English and American
Literature and Language at Harvard. His book The Metaphysical Club won
the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society
of American Historians, and the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction from the Chicago
Tribune, and was named one of the nine best books of 2001 by the editors
of The New York Times Book Review. His other publications include American
Studies and Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context. A
staff writer for The New Yorker, he has been associate editor
of The New Republic, and a contributing editor of The New
York Review of Books. James Oakes, Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History James Oakes has been writing about the struggle over slavery in America
for more than a quarter of a century. He is the author of The Ruling
Race: A History of American Slaveholders; Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation
of the Old South; and most recently, The Radical and the Republican:
Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. He
plans to spend his year at the Cullman Center completing the research on
a history of emancipation during the Civil War. He teaches history at City
University of New York Graduate Center. Han Ong Han Ong was born in the Philippines and came to the United States as a
teenager. He has written more than three dozen plays that have been widely
produced in venues ranging from the Joseph Papp Public Theater to the Almeida
in London; and he has published two novels – Fixer Chao, hailed
as a "new immigrant classic" by The New York Times, and The
Disinherited, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. In
1997 he became one of the youngest fellows of the MacArthur Foundation.
While at the Cullman Center he will be working on a novel that touches
on death, gentrification, and waves of change in New York City. James Pethica James Pethica teaches Irish Studies and Modern Drama at Williams College, with particular interest in History of the Book/Social Text theory and Performance Studies. He is currently completing a book on W.B.Yeats's collaborative partnership with Lady Gregory, and will be working at the Cullman Center on the authorized biography of Lady Gregory; most of Lady Gregory’s papers are in the Library's Berg Collection. His publications include two volumes in the Cornell Yeats series, an edition of Lady Gregory's Diaries, and the Norton Critical Edition of Yeats. Owen Sheers Born in Fiji, Owen Sheers is a Welsh writer whose work includes two poetry
collections, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill, which won
the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, and The Dust Diaries, a non-fiction
narrative set in Zimbabwe, which was short listed for the Royal Society
of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and won the Welsh Book of the Year
2005. His first novel, Resistance, will be published this summer.
He is currently collaborating with the composer Rachel Portman on The
Water Diviner’s Tale, a dramatic song-cycle for the BBC. While
at the Cullman Center, he will be conducting research for This Parliament
of Monsters, an historical novel set in Fiji and New York over the
last decades of the 19th century. Mark Stevens Mark Stevens is the author, with Annalyn Swan, of De Kooning: An American
Master, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics
Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times prize in biography. He has served
as the art critic for Newsweek, The New Republic and,
most recently, New York Magazine, and has written numerous essays
on art and other subjects for various publications. Jennifer Vanderbes Jennifer Vanderbes's first novel, Easter Island, was named a best book
of the year by The Washington Post and The Christian Science
Monitor, nominated for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Prize,
and translated into 16 languages. She was a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, and
has also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Colgate University,
and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She has taught in the
M.F.A. programs at the University of Iowa and Columbia University. Her
essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times and The
Washington Post. She will use her time at the Cullman Center to begin
work on a novel set in 19th century San Francisco. Camilo José Vergara A writer, photographer, and sociologist, Camilo Vergara has been photographing
American urban landscapes since 1977, documenting the changes taking place
in the country’s inner cities. At the Cullman Center he will use
the Library’s collections to enhance the visual record he has created,
turning it into an interactive website and a book. His previous books include Silent
Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (with Kenneth Jackson,
1989), The New American Ghetto (1995), American Ruins (1999), Unexpected
Chicagoland (with Timothy Samuelson, 2001), Twin Towers Remembered (2001), Subway
Memories (2004), and How the Other Half Worships (2005).
Vergara has received numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Foundation
fellowship in 2002. Colson Whitehead Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist, John
Henry Days, and Apex Hides the Hurt, as well as a collection
of essays, The Colossus of New York. His work has appeared in The
New York Times, Granta, Harper's and New York Magazine. He
has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and the
New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. He lives in Brooklyn. Gaby Wood Gaby Wood is a staff writer and New York correspondent for the London Observer. She is the author of The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness, and Edison’s Eve, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. Her next book – In Lana Turner’s Bedroom, based on an article she wrote for Granta – will be published in 2008. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on a book about science, superstition and the work of a photographer-detective in 19th century Paris. |