Long-Term Research Fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia

FAIN: RA-235161-16

Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA 19107-5679)
James N. Green (Project Director: August 2015 to February 2021)
William D. Fenton (Project Director: February 2021 to June 2021)
Emily Guthrie (Project Director: June 2021 to November 2021)
Christine Nelson (Project Director: November 2021 to present)

14 months of stipend support (2-3 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The Library Company of Philadelphia seeks a grant to fund post-doctoral fellowships over a period of three years. In 1987 the Library Company established a fellowship program, which now has more than 800 "alumni." Fellowship opportunities each year include about three dozen one-month grants; several long-term post-doctoral and dissertation fellowships through the Library Company's Programs in Early American Economy and Society and African American History; long-term dissertation fellowships endowed by a local foundation; and long-term post-doctoral fellowships funded by a FPIRI grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our residential research center, a renovated historic townhouse adjacent to our main building, provides the kinds of facilities and amenities needed to support long-term NEH fellows and sustain a community of scholars. Our very positive experience with the previous NEH Fellows encourages us to apply for this vital program. (edited by NEH staff)

Associated Products

The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation. (Book)
Title: The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation.
Author: Benjamin Fagan
Abstract: The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation shows how antebellum African Americans used the newspaper as a means for translating their belief in black “chosenness” into plans and programs for black liberation. During the decades leading up to the Civil War, the idea that God had marked black Americans as his chosen people on earth became a central article of faith in northern black communities, with black newspaper editors articulating it in their journals. Benjamin Fagan shows how the early black press helped shape the relationship between black chosenness and the struggles for black freedom and equality in America, in the process transforming the very notion of a chosen American nation. Exploring how cultures of print helped antebellum black Americans apply their faith to struggles grand and small, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation uses the vast and neglected archive of the early black press to shed new light on many of the central figures and questions of African American studies.
Year: 2016
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8203-494
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

“Painting the ‘Baronial Castle": Thomas Cole at Featherston Park (Article)
Title: “Painting the ‘Baronial Castle": Thomas Cole at Featherston Park
Author: William L. Coleman
Abstract: Thomas Cole's paintings of the country house of the antebellum agriculturalist and geologist George William Featherstonhaugh have fallen into undeserved obscurity. The mere fact that Cole made "house portraits" goes against received wisdom about his rejection of topographic view painting in favor of a rigorously intellectual and poetic art of landscape. Moreover, the reception history of the three surviving canvases in this series has been clouded by the political disputes period commentators had with the patron. Reexamining existing sources alongside new archival discoveries, William L. Coleman interprets the Featherston Park paintings as early evidence of Cole's abiding concern with the inhabited landscape across media
Year: 2017
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Huntington Library Quarterly

Imagining Freedom: Black Girlhood in the Sanders-Venning Family, 1815-1890 (Book Section)
Title: Imagining Freedom: Black Girlhood in the Sanders-Venning Family, 1815-1890
Author: Nazera Sadiq Wright
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2019
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Book Title: A Global History of Black Girlhood

Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Book)
Title: Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America
Author: Matthew Kruer
Abstract: A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America. In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy. Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power. Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people’s struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976177
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674976177
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation (Book)
Title: Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation
Author: Brooke Belisle
Abstract: Depth Effects proposes an alternative throughline from very early experiments with photography to contemporary problems in computational imaging. It looks back to often overlooked practices when photography was a new medium, before it was defined through modernist and medium-specific ideas about the singular, indexical, imprint of an instant. It shows how recent advances in object recognition, depth mapping, and photogrammetry point back, unexpectedly, to nineteenth-century strategies of stereoscopic photography and photosculpture, to the first spatial conventions for photographing people, and to the earliest efforts to use cameras for making maps. It reconsiders how dimensional relationships between and within images have seemed to render the voluminous shape of things, the hidden depths of subjectivity, and the objective coherence of the world itself. (Author's description)
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520393868/depth-effects
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520393868

Dickens and Shakespeare and Longfellow, Oh My!: Staging the Fan Canon at the Nineteenth-Century Authors’ Carnivals (Article)
Title: Dickens and Shakespeare and Longfellow, Oh My!: Staging the Fan Canon at the Nineteenth-Century Authors’ Carnivals
Author: Michael D'Alessandro
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2023
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Literary History 35.2

Freedom in Chains: U.S. Empire and the Illegal Slave Trade (Book Section)
Title: Freedom in Chains: U.S. Empire and the Illegal Slave Trade
Author: M. Scott Heerman
Editor: Michael Blakeman, Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Noelani Arista
Abstract: The essays gathered in The Early Imperial Republic move beyond the question of whether the new republic was an empire, investigating instead where, how, and why it was one. They use the category of empire to situate the early United States in the global context its contemporaries understood, drawing important connections between territorial conquests on the continent and American incursions around the globe. They reveal an early U.S. empire with many different faces, from merchants who sought to profit from the republic’s imperial expansion to Native Americans who opposed or leveraged it, from free Black colonizationists and globe-trotting missionaries to illegal slave traders and anti-imperial social reformers. In tracing these stories, the volume’s contributors bring the study of early U.S. imperialism down to earth, encouraging us to see the exertion of U.S. power on the ground as a process that both drew upon the example of its imperial predecessors and was forced to grapple with their legacies. Taken together, they argue that American empire was never confined to one era but is instead a thread throughout U.S. history.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.pennpress.org/9780812252781/the-early-imperial-republic/
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Book Title: The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War
ISBN: 9780812252781

‘A Great and Rising Nation’: Naval Exploration and the Global Empire in the Early U.S. Republic, 1815–1860 (Book)
Title: ‘A Great and Rising Nation’: Naval Exploration and the Global Empire in the Early U.S. Republic, 1815–1860
Author: Michael A. Verney
Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation flips this notion on its head, arguing that early US naval expeditions, often characterized as merely scientific, were in fact deeply imperialist. Circling the globe from the Mediterranean to South America and the Arctic, these voyages reflected the diverse imperial aspirations of the new republic, including commercial dominance in the Pacific World, religious empire in the Holy Land, proslavery expansion in South America, and diplomatic prestige in Europe. As Verney makes clear, the United States had global imperial aspirations far earlier than is commonly thought.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo153387819.html
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226818382

Prizes

Missouri Conference on History Book Award
Date: 1/1/2023
Organization: State Historical Society of Missouri
Abstract: The Book Award will be given to the best volume on any historical topic written by a Missouri resident and published in a given year.

Honorable Mention: John Lyman Book Prize, U.S. Naval History
Date: 2/1/2023
Organization: North American Society for Oceanic History
Abstract: The John Lyman Book Awards are given annually by the Society in the following six categories: Canadian naval and maritime history; U.S. naval history; U.S. maritime history; science and technology; reference works and published primary sources; and biography and autobiography.

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