We are delighted this year to be able to offer the McBride Rare Books Fellowship for the first time, to support projects on book history and print culture in the United States. Other recent additions to our fellowship portfolio offer support to creative artists, to scholars studying printed ephemera, and for projects that address the history of the Great Lakes. Fellowships were awarded to scholars from all parts of the United States, from Massachusetts to California, as well as from Canada, the United Kingdom, and China. Clements Library fellows will draw on resources in the collections to explore a vast range of projects, from disciplinary perspectives that span the arts and humanities. With the support of a Jacob Price Dissertation Fellowship, Sarah Donovan will examine patterns of extralegal violence carried out by gangs of young men on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. Chase Castle, our inaugural McBride Rare Books fellow, will examine differences in the print culture of hymnody between Black and White churches in the 19th-century U.S. Minseok Jang will seek to uncover the forgotten centrality of kerosene to the development of the United States’ global petroleum industry with the support of a Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship. And Lindsey Willow Smith, an incoming Dorothy and Herman Miller Fellow, will study the history of Native American communities in 19th and 20th century Detroit, with a particular focus on Indigenous women.
The fellowship projects that we are so proud to support this year will draw from all areas of the library’s collection. Working with the visiting fellows always teaches those of us who work at the Clements new things about the materials that we care for, and we look forward to welcoming these scholars to Ann Arbor and supporting them in their work.
We would also like to thank all of the donors whose generous support helps make these research opportunities possible. Particularly now, as the sources of funding to support humanities research shrink seemingly by the day, gifts to the Clements Library’s fellowship program are essential in maintaining the Clements’ standing as one of the nation’s finest places to study our shared past. If you are interested in helping support researchers travel to Ann Arbor to visit the Clements, please write to me at [email protected] or to Maggie Vanderford at [email protected] to learn more.
2025-2026 William L. Clements Library Fellows
Long-Term Fellowships
Dorothy and Herman Miller Fellowship in Great Lakes History (4 months)
- Alec Reichardt
Assistant Professor of History, University of Missouri
Path Diplomacy and the Landscape of Politics: Remapping Sovereignty in Early America
Jacob M. Price Dissertation Fellowship (3 months)
- Sarah Donovan
PhD Candidate in History, William & Mary
Transplanted Whiteboys and Sons of Paxton: Patterns of Extralegal Violence in the British Atlantic World
Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship (3 months)
- Rachel Walker
Associate Professor of History, University of Hartford
Free Radicals: Fringe Thinkers and the Fight for Liberty in 19th-Century America
Short-Term Fellowships (1 month)
Alfred A. Cave Fellowship
- Saffron Sener
PhD Candidate in History, Harvard University
Walking on Their Land
Brian Leigh Dunnigan Fellowship in the History of Cartography
- Will Glover
PhD Candidate in English, Boston University
The Poetics of Colonial Accounting in Early America, 1584-1801
Ephemera Society of America Fellowship
- Jordan Klevdal
PhD Candidate in English, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Against Illustration: The Laminated Image in American Photography and Print
James E. Laramy Fellowship in American Visual Culture
- Rebecca Stasiunas
PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Delaware
Art from the Ecotone: Nacre-Inlay Furnishings from the Spanish Americas, 1650-1750
McBride Rare Books Fellowship
- Chase Castle
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music, University of Delaware
The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century American Hymns
Richard and Mary Jo Marsh Fellowship
- Tingfeng Yan
PhD Candidate in History, University of Chicago
Administration and the Making of the Constitutional Order in Founding-era America
Dorothy and Herman Miller Fellowship in Great Lakes History
- Jacob Breadman
PhD Candidate in History, Queens University (Kingston, Ontario)
“More by sickness tho’ than by the sword”: Environmental History of the War of 1812
Howard H. Peckham Fellowship on Revolutionary America
- Molly Nebiolo
Assistant Professor of History, Butler University
Constructing Health: Concepts of Well-Being in an Urbanizing Atlantic - Mica Miralles Bianconi
PhD Candidate in History, William & Mary
The British Invasions of the Rio de la Plata and the Anglo-Iberian Entanglement in the South Atlantic, 1760s-1820s
(also the recipient of the ATBL-Transatlantic Fellowship)
Julius S. Scott III Fellowship in Caribbean and Atlantic History
- Catherine Doucette
PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Virginia
Materialities of Blackness in Early Colonial Jamaica, c. 1655-1850
John W. Shy Memorial Fellowship
- Shealynn Hendry
PhD Candidate in History, University of Cambridge
“I am Half Republican”: The National Character(s) of Revolutionary Exiles, 1783-1825
Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship
- Minseok Jang
PhD Candidate in History, SUNY-Albany
Trust on Fires: Kerosene, Standard Oil, and Anti-Monopoly, 1846-1911 - Ella Starkman-Hynes
PhD Candidate in History, Yale University
A Different Kind of Mirror: Examining the Role of Alternate History in Civil War Memory
Week-Long Fellowships (1 week)
Brian Leigh Dunnigan Fellowship in the History of Cartography
- Juliet Wiersema
Associate Professor of Art History, University of Texas-San Antonio
English Designs on the Spanish Pacific: William Hack’s South Sea Waggoners and England’s Imperial Ambitions (1650-1711)
David B. Kennedy and Earhart Fellowship
- Greg Brooking
High School History Teacher, Fulton County Public Schools (Georgia)
Henry Laurens: A Southern Founder
Earhart Fellowship in American History
- Tanner Ogle
PhD Candidate in History, Texas A&M University
The Jacobite Revolution and the American Revolution - Jordan Smith
Associate Professor of History, Widener University
Antigua at the Center of the World: The Families of Green Castle Hill and a Violent Atlantic
Forty-Three Foundation Fellowship
- Shuyao Zhang
Undergraduate, University of Michigan
Rehearing “Yankee Doodle”: From Obscure Origins to Tin-Pan Alley Hit
Clayton Lewis Fellowship in American Culture
- Joshua Santo Domingo
PhD Candidate in History, University of California-Santa Cruz
Errant “Tawa”: A Brief History of Filipino Laughter, 1898-1946
Richard & Mary Jo Marsh Fellowship
- Jessica Roney
Associate Professor of History, Temple University
The Untold States of America
Dorothy and Herman Miller Fellowship in Great Lakes History
- Lindsey Willow Smith
PhD Candidate in History, University of Minnesota
Detroit as a Native City: Community-Making and Women's Roles Before, During, and After Relocation
Mary G. Stange Fellowship for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers
- Laura Perdrizet
Independent Artist, Yonkers, NY
Nomadic Mythologies
Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship
- Tucker Adkins
Assistant Professor of History, Milligan University
Revivalism Controversies - Susan Branson
Professor of History, Syracuse University
American Yarn: Wool, Labor, and Markets 1620-1920 - Kate Doubler
Visiting Assistant Professor of English, University of South Florida
The Prophetess: Delia Bacon, the Search for Shakespeare, and the American Knowledge Tradition - Matthew Goetz
Assistant Professor of History, United States Military Academy
“The Barbary States of America”: The Barbary Wars and American Racial Politics - Ezra Greenspan
Emeritus Professor of English, Southern Methodist University
Frederick Douglass and His People: A Family Biography - Abdiel Perez
Affiliate Faculty in History, Emerson College
Yucatan, Texas, and the Limits of US Expansion in the Gulf of Mexico, 1821-1860
Digital Fellowship (1 week)
Jacob M. Price Digital Fellowship
- Yubing Zang
PhD Candidate in History, Peking University
Race, U.S.-Japan Relations, and the Collapse of the Washington System