NEH Fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library

FAIN: RA-50056-07

John Carter Brown Library (Providence, RI 02906)
Ted Widmer (Project Director: September 2006 to November 2012)
Margot M. Nishimura (Project Director: November 2012 to June 2012)

Funding details:
Original grant (2007) $172,000.00
Supplement (2008) $106,800.00

The equivalent of two fellowships a year for two years.

The JCB Library is seeking renewal of funding for long-term fellowships. The Library has an ongoing program of short-term fellowships in which it invests $180,000 annually exclusive of NEH and Mellon Foundation funding. NEH fellowships are an invaluable contribution to the Program. The Library currently appoints 25-30 research fellows a year, all of whom are engaged in research on some aspect of the history of the Americas, North and South, during the colonial period, i.e., from 1492 to ca. 1825. Study of all colonial empires is encompassed: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English - along with the history of Africans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Associated Products

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Book)
Title: Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit
Author: Kristen Block
Abstract: Using the stories of ordinary people, this volume examines the entangled histories of Spain and England in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century, focusing on colonialism's two main goals: profit and Christian dominance. Seen from their perspective, the development of modern capitalism, race, and Christianity emerges as a story of negotiation, contingency, humanity, and the quest for community.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/ordinary-lives-in-the-early-caribbean-religion-colonial-competition-and-the-politics-of-profit/oclc/768168211&referer=brief_results
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780820338682

Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Book)
Title: Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage
Author: Vincent Carretta
Abstract: Phillis Wheatley became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman -- of any race or background -- to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. In Phillis Wheatley, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status, uncovering new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography. Carretta relocates Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die in obscurity a few years later.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/phillis-wheatley-biography-of-a-genius-in-bondage/oclc/719714733&referer=brief_results
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780820333380

Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Book)
Title: Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel
Author: Srinivas Aravamudan
Abstract: Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.
Abstract: Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/714726335
Primary URL Description: Worldcat
Secondary URL: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo12274753.html
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's listing
Access Model: Book publication
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226024509
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Prizes

Oscar Kenshur Prize for best book in eighteenth-century studies
Date: 9/19/2013
Organization: Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University
Abstract: An annual book prize to an outstanding monograph of interest to eighteenth-century scholars working in a range of disciplines. The prize is named in honor of the work of Oscar Kenshur, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Indiana University, a dix-huitièmiste par excellence and one of the founding members of the Center.

The Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award 2014
Date: 3/27/2014
Organization: International Society for the Study of Narrative
Abstract: An award that "honors the many past and continuing contributions of Barbara Perkins and George Perkins to the development and success of the Society [for the Study of Narrative], including the founding of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. All books on the topic of narrative, whether edited collections, collaboratively written books, or monographs, are eligible to compete.

The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World (Book)
Title: The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World
Author: Ralph Bauer
Abstract: This book explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the conquest of America and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. While the roots of the modern 'conquistadorial' attitude toward nature lie in late medieval alchemy, which fused Aristotelian reason with Christian apocalypticism in the militant context of crusade and spiritual conquest, this book argues that the modern idea of what it means to discover something has a colonial history in which conquest legitimated the modern (Baconian) idea of discovery by underwriting it with religious messianism and early modern state power. Thus, the book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of such late medieval alchemists as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Jose´ de Acosta, Nicola´s Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.
Year: 2019
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Translating Nature: Transcultural Histories of Early Modern Science in the Atlantic World (Book)
Title: Translating Nature: Transcultural Histories of Early Modern Science in the Atlantic World
Editor: Ralph Bauer
Editor: Jaime Maroquin Arredondo
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2019
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Edited Volume
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Crucible of the Tropics: Alchemy, Translation, and the English Discovery of America (Book Section)
Title: The Crucible of the Tropics: Alchemy, Translation, and the English Discovery of America
Author: Ralph Bauer
Editor: Ralph Bauer
Editor: Jaime Maroquin Arredondo
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2019
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Book Title: Translating Nature: Transcultural Histories of Early Modern Science in the Atlantic World

The Writings of Phyllis Wheatley (Book)
Title: The Writings of Phyllis Wheatley
Editor: Vincent Carretta
Abstract: Includes all of Phillis Wheatley's known writings, some of them only recently discovered Chronological organization enables the reader to trace Wheatley's development as an author Includes extensive textual and explanatory notes Presents all known surviving letters to, as well as from, Wheatley A comprehensive Introduction gives a fuller sense of Wheatley and the context of her writings
Year: 2019
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Edited Volume
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Working Lives of Eighteenth-Century Authors of African Descent (Book Section)
Title: The Working Lives of Eighteenth-Century Authors of African Descent
Author: Vincent Carretta
Editor: William J. Christman
Editor: Kevin Binfield
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2018
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Book Title: Teaching British Laboring-Class Literature

A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Book)
Title: A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica
Author: Brooke Newman
Abstract: Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, this book explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.
Year: 2018
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Environment, Space and Place: Cultural Geographies of Colonial Afro-Latin America (Book Section)
Title: Environment, Space and Place: Cultural Geographies of Colonial Afro-Latin America
Author: Karl Offen
Editor: George Reid
Editor: Alejandro de la Fuente
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2018
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: Afro-Latin American Studies: an Introduction

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