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Announcements – Summer/Fall 2021

Clements Library Associates Board of Governors News

M. Haskell Newman served on the board from 2010 until 2017. He passed away on April 12, 2021.

Martha Seger was a long-standing and active member of the board from 1994 until her death on June 30, 2021.

Paul Ganson died on January 2, 2021 after serving on the board since 2005.

Four new board members were elected by a special electronic vote this summer. Derk J. Finley of Brandon, MS; Troy E. Hollar of Tuscon, AZ; James E. Laramy of Ada, MI; and Kristin A. Cabral of McLean, VA.

NEH Grant Awarded for Gage Papers

The William L. Clements Library has been awarded a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize one of our largest and most utilized collections. The funds will support a three-year-long effort to digitize over 23,000 items related to Thomas Gage, a famed British commander-in-chief in the early days of the American Revolution who was also the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1774 to 1775.

“Multiplying modes of access to our collections is one of our primary goals,” said Paul Erickson, the Randolph G. Adams Director of the Clements Library. “We will always remain committed to welcoming the many scholars who travel to Ann Arbor from around the world to do research in the Clements Library, but we are also committed to making it possible for people anywhere in the world to study landmark collections like the Gage Papers.”

Audiences can expect to be able to view parts of the digitized collection via the online finding aid as progress is made over the course of the grant. The complete collection is expected to be available by May 2024, with support from the U-M Library’s Digital Content and Collections service.

Library shelves with archival boxes and taller red leather bound volumes

As part of the digitization process, the Gage documents are being removed from the beloved (but slippery) red volumes and transferred to standard archival housing.

Photograph of a smiling baby in Native American cradleboard

The UMMA exhibit will include [Kiowa Infant in Cradleboard], ca. 1889-91, Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography.

Exhibit News

University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) features several photographs from the Clements’ Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography in its ongoing exhibit, Unsettling Histories: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism.

The Saginaw Art Museum will also include items from the Pohrt Collection in its upcoming exhibition, ‘No, Not Even For a Picture’: Re-examining the Native Midwest and the Tribes’ Relations to the History of Photography, based on the Clements Library’s online exhibit of the same name. The exhibit is scheduled to run from October 27, 2021 to February 26, 2022.

2021-22 Fellows

Long Term Fellowships (3 month)
Howard H. Peckham Fellowship on Revolutionary America
  • Camden Elliott, Harvard University. “Sisyphus in the Wilderness:  Environmental Histories of the French and Indian Wars, 1676-1766.”  
Jacob M. Price Dissertation Fellowship
  • Jessica Fletcher, Vanderbilt University.  “Before the Amistad:  Atlantic Litigants and the Politics of Haiti and Cuba’s Legal Currents in the Early Nineteenth-Century US.”  
Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship
  • Mariah Gruner, Boston University. “Puncturing Femininity: The Construction of Race and Gender in Antislavery Needlework.”
Short Term Fellowships (1 month)
Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship
  • Dr. Richard Bell, University of Maryland. “The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York.”
  • Dr. Greta LaFleur, Yale University. “A Queer History of Sexual Violence.”
  • Phillippa Pitts, Boston University. “Picturing a Medical Democracy: The Art & Visual Culture of American Pharmacopeia, 1800-1860.”
Alfred A. Cave Fellowship
  • Dr. Samantha Davis, The Pennsylvania State University. “In Plain Sight: Negotiating Gender and Race in Yucatán, 1521-1821.”
Reese Fellowship in the Print Culture of the Americas
  • Dr. Daniel Diez Couch, United States Air Force Academy. “Literature, the Subject, and the Act of Erasure.”
  • Dr. Danielle Skeehan, Oberlin College. “Genealogies of the American Quill: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Natural History of Handwriting.”
Howard H. Peckham Fellowship on Revolutionary America
  • Adam McNeil, Rutgers University. “‘I Would No Go With Him’: Black Women, Liberty, and Loyalism in the Revolutionary Era Mid-Atlantic, 1775-1815.”
  • Sarah Pearlman Shapiro, Brown University. “Women’s Communities of Care in Revolutionary New England.”
  • Keely Smith, Princeton University. “Communicating Power and Sovereignty: Creek and Seminole Communication Networks from 1715-1880.”
  • Emily Yankowitz, Yale University. “Documenting Citizenship: How Early Americans Understood the Concept of Citizenship, 1776-1840.”
Week-Long Fellowships
Richard & Mary Jo Marsh Fellowship
  • Dr. Carrie Tirado Bramen, University at Buffalo. “‘The Journey-work of the Stars’: A Cultural History of Astrology in the American Nineteenth Century.”
David B. Kennedy and Earhart Fellowship
  • Dr. Carolyn Eastman, Virginia Commonwealth University. “A Plague in New York City: How the City Confronted—and Survived—Yellow Fever in the Founding Era.”
Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship
  • Dr. Aaron Hall, University of Minnesota. “The Founding Rules: Slavery and the Creation of American Constitutionalism, 1789-1889.”
  • Dr. Amanda Moniz, Smithsonian Institution. “Isabella Graham, Founding Philanthropist.“ Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship.
  • Heather Walser, The Pennsylvania State University. “Amnesty’s Origins: Peace, Federal Power, and the Public Good in the Long Civil War Era.”
Mary G. Stange Fellowship
  • Dr. Nikki Hessell, Victoria University of Wellington. “Lewis Cass and the Poetics of Treaties.”
Howard H. Peckham Fellowship on Revolutionary America
  • Dr. Marcus Nevius, University of Rhode Island. “The Revolution from Below: A Story of Race and Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1760s to the 1790s.”
Forty-three Foundation Fellowship
  • Rachael Schnurr, Eastern Michigan University. “Adapting to Americanization: Mixed Race Families and the Coming of the American State.”
Brian Leigh Dunnigan Fellowship in the History of Cartography
  • Nicole Sintetos, Brown University. “Reclamation: Race, Labor and the Mapping of Settler States.”
Non-Resident Fellowship
Jacob M. Price Digital Fellowship
  • James Rick, College of William & Mary.  “Cultivating Machines:  Capitalism and Technology in Midwestern Agriculture, 1840-1900.” 

 

Clements Library logo

Randolph G. Adams Director of the Clements Library
Paul J. Erickson

Committee of Management
Mark S. Schlissel, Chairman
Gregory E. Dowd, James L. Hilton, David B. Walters.
Paul J. Erickson, Secretary

Clements Library Associates Board of Governors
Bradley L. Thompson II, Chairman
John R. Axe, John L. Booth II, Kristin A. Cabral, Candace Dufek, William G. Earle, Charles R. Eisendrath, Derk J. Finley, Eliza Finkenstaedt Hillhouse, Troy E. Hollar, Martha S. Jones, Sally Kennedy, Joan Knoertzer, James E. Laramy, Thomas C. Liebman, Richard C. Marsh, Janet Mueller, Drew Peslar, Richard Pohrt, Catharine Dann Roeber, Anne Marie Schoonhoven, Harold T. Shapiro, Arlene P. Shy, James P. Spica, Edward D. Surovell, Irina Thompson, Benjamin Upton, Leonard A. Walle, David B. Walters, Clarence Wolf.
Paul J. Erickson, Secretary

Clements Library Associates Honorary Board of Governors
Peter Heydon, Chair Emeritus
Philip P. Mason, Joanna Schoff.

Clements Library Associates share an interest in American history and a desire to ensure the continued growth of the Library’s collections. All donors to the Clements Library are welcomed to this group. The contributions collected through the Associates fund are used to purchase historical materials. You can make a gift online at leadersandbest.umich.edu or by calling 734-647-0864.

Published by the Clements Library
University of Michigan
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phone: (734) 764-2347 • fax: (734) 647-0716
Website: http://www.clements.umich.edu

Terese M. Austin, Editor, austintm@umich.edu
Tracy Payovich, Designer, tgierada@umich.edu

Regents of the University
Jordan B. Acker, Huntington Woods; Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc; Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor; Paul W. Brown, Ann Arbor; Sarah Hubbard, Okemos; Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms; Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor; Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor.
Mark S. Schlissel, ex officio

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