The William L. Clements Library is delighted to announce 2023-2024 visiting research fellowship cohort: With 26 awards, this cohort will be the largest in the fellowship program’s history. Awardees include postdoctoral scholars and faculty from both public and private institutions, graduate students, independent researchers, public historians, and curators. The library will support long-term, short-term and week-long residential fellows over the coming academic year, and will also fund remote research via the Jacob M. Price Digital Fellowship.
Funded projects are as exciting and varied as they have ever been. The proposed slate evidences the ability of the Clements collections to support a simultaneously rich, broad, and deep range of projects. Topics range from breastfeeding and race in the 18th-century Atlantic to inventories of sacred music, studies of exogenous species in the Great Lakes, and 19th-century Choctaw diplomacy. The diverse cohort also represents the Library’s commitment to create access for not only scholars researching underrepresented communities in American history, but for researchers working outside university settings. In partnership with the American Trust for the British Library (ATBL), the recipient of this year’s ATBL-Clements Fellowship is Dr. Matthew Keagle, a public historian and Curator at Fort Ticonderoga. Dr. Keagle will incorporate Clements holdings into his research for public exhibitions and publications in honor of the 250th anniversary of the American War of Independence.
Thanks to generous support from donors, the Clements will also offer four new specialized research fellowships for the first time:
- Raymond Hyser, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, received the inaugural Julius S. Scott III Fellowship in Caribbean and Atlantic History. The short-term fellowship supports early-career researchers working in the fields of Atlantic and Caribbean history, and is named for Dr. Julius Scott, a lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.
- Dr. Melissa Geisler Trafton (College of the Holy Cross) and Dr. Jonathan Field (Clemson University) will be the first James E. Laramy Fellows in American Visual Culture. The Laramy Fellowship is the first in Clements’ history to specifically support projects utilizing the library’s collection of visual and graphic materials.
- Grant Stanton, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, was awarded the John W. Shy Memorial Fellowship. This short-term fellowship honors Professor John Shy, who was the preeminent American authority on the military aspects of the Revolutionary era.
- Anonymous (Department of the History of Science, Harvard University) was selected for the Dorothy and Herman Miller Fellowship in Great Lakes History. Established in honor of Dorothy Miller (1923-2018) and Herman Miller (1924-2021), this fellowship provides access for scholars working on the history and culture of the Great Lakes Region.
Please join us in welcoming the new fellows to the William L. Clements Library’s community of scholars, and in expressing our deepest gratitude to the donors who make such opportunities possible. Each gift contributes to the library’s ability to facilitate access, foster scholarly opportunity, and continually establish the Clements as a world-class research destination for the study of American history and culture. If you’d like to learn more about how you can be involved with the fellowship program as an applicant or as a supporter (or both!), please write to [email protected] to start the conversation.
–Maggie Vanderford, Librarian for Instruction & Engagement
2023-2024 William L. Clements Library Fellows
Long-Term Fellowships (4 months)
Norton Strange Townshend Long-Term Fellow
- Frank Cirillo, Massachusetts Historical Society
The Long Shadow of Abolitionism
Jacob M. Price Dissertation Fellow (2 months)
- Cora Anthony, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Queer Genealogies of Black Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century - Andrea Miles, University of Louisville
Black Rebels: African American Revolutionaries from North Carolina During and After the War of Independence
Dorothy and Herman Miller Fellow in Great Lakes History
- Anonymous, Harvard University
Lost at Port: Making Relations with Ballast-Borne Exogenous Species in the Great Lakes
Short-Term Fellowships (1 month)
Norton Strange Townshend Short-Term Fellows
- Nym Cooke, retired
Inventory of American Sacred Music Imprints and Manuscripts through 1820 - Allison Russell, University of Massachusetts Amherst
“On That Shield!”: American Identity and the Constitution in the Early Republic
Alfred A. Cave Fellow
- Elena Telles Ryan, Princeton University
Making Paper Law Powerful: The End of Legal Pluralism in the Great Lakes
Howard H. Peckham Short-Term Fellows on Revolutionary America
- Steven Pincus, University of Chicago
The Global British Empire to 1789
John W. Shy Memorial Fellow
- Grant Stanton, University of Pennsylvania
The Almost Revolution of 1765: Insults and the Moral History of the Stamp Act Crisis
John M. Price Short-Term Dissertation Fellows
- John Patrick Fetherston, University of Maryland, College Park
“Daring to Call for Liquor”: North American Taverns and the Making of a Black Counterrepublic, 1712-1831 - Caroline C..C. Borzilleri, George Washington University
The Personal and Professional Lives of Women Printers in the Early American Republic
Julius S. Scott III Fellow in Caribbean and Atlantic History
- Raymond Hyser, University of Texas at Austin
Caribbean Ceylon: Trans-Imperial Networks, Knowledge-Making, and Plantation Coffee in the Global Tropics
Richard and Mary Jo Marsh Short-Term Fellow
- Ross Nedervelt, Florida International University
The Border-seas of a New British Empire: Security, Imperial Reconstitution, and the British Atlantic Islands in the Age of the American Revolution
Week-Long Fellowships (1 week)
Richard & Mary Jo Marsh Fellow
- Lindsay Schakenbach-Regele, Miami University
The Miranda Affair: A Venezuelan Patriot and the United States
David B. Kennedy and Earhart Fellow
- Katherine Johnston, Montana State University
Nourishing Slavery: Breast Feeding and Race in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic - Amanda Stuckey, Central Penn College
Recovering Touch: Disability, Literacy, and the Nineteenth-Century Felt Word
Brian Leigh Dunnigan Fellows in the History of Cartography
- Casey Price, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Given to This Land: Mapping Settler Colonialism in Kituwah, 1682-1810 - Nicole Emser Marcel, Temple University
Ordering, Reordering, and Disordering the Land: Visual and Material Strategies of Resistance and Repossession in Contemporary Caribbean Art
John M. Price Week-Long Dissertation Fellows
- Edward Green, Pennsylvania State University
Interdependency, Diplomacy, and Legitimacy in the Choctaw Nation, 1729-1924 - Alice Martin, Rutgers University
Women’s Manuscript Culture and Rhetorical Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century America
James E. Laramy Fellows in American Visual Culture
- Melissa Geisler Trafton, College of the Holy Cross
Transformation of Scale and Habits: Animals on Printed Ephemera in the Age of Darwin - Jonathan Beecher Field, Clemson University
The Objects of Settler Innocence: The Cultures of Colonialism in New England, 1620-2020
Norton Strange Townshend Fellows
- Todd Thompson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Manifest Jestiny: 19th-Century Humor and US Imperialism
Introduction to Archival Research Fellowship (1 week)
Forty-three Foundation Fellow
- Justin Hyun, University of Michigan
Working Class Daily Life During the American Industrial Revolution
Digital Fellowship (1 week)
Jacob M. Price Digital Fellow
- Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Duke University
Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World
American Trust for the British Library and William L. Clements Library Fellowship (2 weeks)
- Matthew Keagle, Fort Ticonderoga
RealTime Revolution