The William L. Clements Library is pleased to share the list of fellowship awardees from the 2024-2025 cycle. Thanks to the support of generous donors, the Library was able to provide research funding for 33 projects spanning a diverse range of disciplines, topics, proposed outcomes, and methodologies.
Several new opportunities enhanced the slate of fellowship offerings this year. For the first time, the Clements welcomed proposals from artists, poets, public historians, documentarians, and other creative professionals applying for the Mary G. Stange Fellowship for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers. During the 2024-2025 fellowship year, three artists-in-residence will visit the Clements to conduct archival research in support of their artistic ventures in music, public history, and fine art engagement. Visual culture research was also made possible by the exciting new collaboration between the Clements Library and the Ephemera Society of America. The month-long Ephemera Society of America Fellowship, awarded to Alexandra Cade (PhD Candidate in History, University of Delaware) offers not only research funding, but the potential for partnership with the ESA through publication in The Ephemera Journal or via presenting at the ESA Annual Conference. Also new this year, the Clayton Lewis Fellowship in American Culture adds to the rich roster of visual culture fellowships by providing a stipend for a week of research in the Library’s expansive Graphics Division.
The 2024-2025 cohort includes fellows at nearly all stages of the academic career trajectory, as well as fellows who work in other fields. The Clements is always delighted to connect with researchers from museums, archives, and public history institutions whose projects require archival research. Matthew Skic (2024-2025 David B. Kennedy and Earhart Fellowship) is the Curator of Exhibitions at the Museum of the American Revolution, and will join us for a week to delve into Clements collections that will support his project, “Loyalists at War: The Story of the Queen’s Rangers.” Fellowships were also awarded to independent researchers, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, tenure-line faculty, and an undergraduate student, demonstrating the library’s deep commitment to creating access for as many stages of the research process as possible.
I encourage you to spend a moment and scroll through the following list of awardees and projects. The titles of those projects demonstrate the sheer scope, breadth, and depth of the Clements Library’s world-class primary source materials, which can aid research on an almost unimaginable variety of topics. One of the Library’s primary goals, and indeed, a central reason for its existence, is to facilitate access to such materials for anybody who needs to see them. The Fellowship Program, in my opinion, is one of the most important ways that we fulfill this goal each year. We look forward to welcoming a class of brilliant scholars and thinkers to make sense of the collections in ways that we might not have even dreamed of.
Please join me in welcoming these fellows to a long history of scholarship at the William L. Clements Library, and in thanking the donors who make these research opportunities possible. Gifts to the Fellowship Program are essential in establishing the Clements as a cornerstone research library 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 mhappe@umich.edu to start the conversation.
–Maggie Vanderford, Librarian for Instruction & Engagement
2024-2025 William L. Clements Library Fellows
Long-Term Fellowships
Jacob M. Price Dissertation Fellowship (2 months)
- Ryan Langton, PhD Candidate in History, Temple University
Negotiating the Endless Mountains: Networked Diplomacy along the Eighteenth-Century Trans-Appalachian Frontier
Dorothy and Herman Miller Fellowship in Great Lakes History (2 months)
- Ramya Swayamprakash, Assistant Professor, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Grand Valley State University
Islands in the Straits: Technology, Transformation, and Remarking Nature along the Detroit River 1860-1960 - Ben Pokross, Duane H. King Postdoctoral Fellow, Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum, University of Tulsa
Writing History in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes
Short-Term Fellowships (1 month)
Norton Strange Townshend Short-Term Fellowship
- Ashley Reed, Associate Professor of English, Virginia Tech
Spiritualist Religion in American Women’s Writing, 1848-1910 - Ben Bascom, Assistant Professor of English, Ball State University
Eccentric Queers: Sexuality and Debility in Nineteenth-Century America - Javier Eduardo Ramírez López, PhD Candidate in History, El Colegio de México
The Great American Bookseller: The Formation and Dispersion of Henry Stevens’s Mexican Collection - Johann Neem, Professor of History, Western Washington University
The Daily Life of American Democracy, 1780s-1850s
Alfred A. Cave Fellowship
- Emily Dixon Magness, PhD Candidate in History, William & Mary
“If you had paid attention, you would know”: The Sacred World of Eighteenth-Century Cherokee-Anglo Politics
Howard H. Peckham Fellowship on Revolutionary America
- Ronald Angelo Johnson, Associate Professor of History, Baylor University
Mutual Entanglements: Transracial Ties Between Haitians and Revolutionary Americans
John W. Shy Memorial Fellowship
- Blake McGready, PhD Candidate in History, Graduate Center, City University of New York
Making Nature’s Nation: The Revolutionary War and Environmental Interdependence in New York, 1775-1783
John M. Price Short-Term Fellowship
- Blake Grindon, Patrick Henry Scholar, Postdoctoral Fellow in History, Johns Hopkins University
The Death of Jane McCrea: Sovereignty and Violence in the Northeastern Borderlands of the American Revolution
Julius S. Scott III Fellowship in Caribbean and Atlantic History
- Rachel Tils, PhD Candidate in History, University of Chicago
Marketing in the System: Policing the Antillean Internal Economy. 1763-1807 - Phoebe Labat, PhD Candidate in History, Brown University
Natural Disasters in the French Atlantic, 1624-1843
Richard and Mary Jo Marsh Short-Term Fellowship
- David R. Whitesell, Independent Scholar
A Bibliographical Catalog of Pre-1901 American and Canadian Photographically Illustrated Books
MacManus & Co. Fellowship
- Henry Knight Lozano, Senior Lecturer in American History, University of Exeter
Reptile Dominion: A Human-Reptile History of Florida in the Nineteenth Century
Ephemera Society of America Fellowship
- Alexandra Cade, PhD Candidate in History, University of Delaware
Schottische at the Spa; Waltz at the Waterfall: Sensory Performance of National Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Tourism
Brian Leigh Dunnigan Fellowship in the History of Cartography
- Carli LaPierre, PhD Candidate in History, Queen’s University
From Where We Stand: Visual Imagery and Understandings of Space in Eighteenth-Century Northeastern North America
Week-Long Fellowships (1 week)
Richard & Mary Jo Marsh Fellowship
- Ryan Morini, Director of Community Oral History Collections, Doy Leale McCall Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama
The Unsettled Life of an Eastern Nevada Ghost Town
David B. Kennedy and Earhart Fellowship
- Matthew Skic, Curator of Exhibitions, Museum of the American Revolution
Loyalists at War: The Story of the Queen’s Rangers
Brian Leigh Dunnigan Fellowship in the History of Cartography
- Alanna Loucks, PhD Candidate in History, Queen’s University
Imagined Imperial Spaces: Comparing Cartographic Representations of the Great Lakes Region in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
Mary G. Stange Fellowship for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers
- Tina Villadolid, Independent Scholar
More Pieces of the Archipelago: Connectivity between UM and the Philippines - Ruth Lopez, Independent Scholar
Finding Miss Jennie Curtis - Alexander Ames, Director of Outreach & Engagement, The Rosenbach Museum & Library / Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation
“The Sound of Harps Angelical”: A Celtic Harpist Residency at the William L. Clements Library
Jacob M. Price Week-Long Fellowship
- Emily Lampert, PhD Candidate in History, Rice University
The Virginian Atlantic: Virginia in the British Imagination, 1780-1860 - Jack Werner, PhD Candidate in History, University of Maryland, College Park
Ableist Empire: U.S Colonialism, Disability, and Labor in the United States and the Philippines, 1898-1916
James E. Laramy Fellowship in American Visual Culture
- Mary Kate Robbett, PhD Candidate in History, Northwestern University
Collecting the War: Civil War Relics, 1865-1915 - Jeremy McLaughlin, PhD Candidate in Information, University of Wisconsin – Madison
A Most Familiar Form(e): Textual and Visual Knowledge Transmission in the Cultural Astronomy of Colonial North America
Norton Strange Townshend Week-Long Fellowship
- Jess Libow, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Program, Haverford College
Obscure Conditions: Visualizing Health in Nineteenth-Century American Literature - Jordan T. Watkins, Assistant Professor of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University
Slavery and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century - Ashley Rattner, Assistant Professor of English, Jacksonville State University
The Crass Materiality of Utopia: Publishing Communitarian Reform in Nineteenth-Century America
Clayton Lewis Fellowship in American Culture
- Emily Schollenberger, PhD Candidate in Art History, Temple University
Shifting Sediments: Photography, Memory, and Imperial Landscape
Introduction to Archival Research Fellowship (1 week)
Forty-Three Foundation Fellowship
- Leah Driehorst, Undergraduate, University of Michigan
Paradox of Progress: Uncovering the Problematic Views of Late 19th-Century American Reformers
Digital Fellowship (1 week)
Jacob M. Price Digital Fellowship
- Surekha Davies, Independent Researcher
Humans: A Monstrous History
American Trust for the British Library and William L. Clements Library Fellowship (2 weeks)
- Dannie Brice, PhD Candidate in History, Duke University
Imperial Grounds: Coffee, Entangled Empires, and the British Military Occupation of Saint-Domingue, 1789-1833