NEH Post-Doctoral Fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia

FAIN: RA-50059-07

Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA 19107-5679)
John C. Van Horne (Project Director: September 2006 to May 2012)

The equivalent of one fellowship a year for three years.

The Library Company of Philadelphia seeks a grant of $138,000 to fund up to 12 post-doctoral fellowship months for each of three years. In 1987 the Library Company established a fellowship program, which now has more than 400 alumni. Fellowship opportunities each year include about two dozen one-month grants as well as long-term post-doctoral and dissertation fellowships through the Library Company's Program in Early American Economy and Society and long-term post-doctoral fellowships funded by the initial FPIRI grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our recent creation of a residential research center in a newly-renovated historic townhouse immediately 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 first cohort of NEH Fellows (and theirs with us!) encourages us to apply for continued funding of this invaluable program.

Associated Products

The News at the End of the Earth: Polar Periodicals (Book Section)
Title: The News at the End of the Earth: Polar Periodicals
Author: Hester Blum
Editor: Dana Luciano
Editor: Ivy Wilson
Abstract: In Unsettled States, Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson present some of the most exciting emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the “long” nineteenth century. Featuring eleven essays from senior scholars across the discipline, the book responds to recent critical challenges to the boundaries, both spatial and temporal, that have traditionally organized scholarship within the field. The volume considers these recent challenges to be aftershocks of earlier revolutions in content and method, and it seeks ways of inhabiting and amplifying the ongoing unsettledness of the field. Written by scholars primarily working in the “minor” fields of critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and gender studies, labor studies, and queer/sexuality studies, the essays share a minoritarian critical orientation. Minoritarian criticism, as an aesthetic, political, and ethical project, is dedicated to finding new connections and possibilities within extant frameworks. Unsettled States seeks to demonstrate how the goals of minoritarian critique may be actualized without automatic recourse to a predetermined “minor” location, subject, or critical approach. Its contributors work to develop practices of reading an “American literature” in motion, identifying nodes of inquiry attuned to the rhythms of a field that is always on the move. (Description of book: chapter description unavailable)
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/unsettled-states-nineteenth-century-american-literary-studies/oclc/863195424&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=12549#.U3ud6Si9ZfQ
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: New York University Press
Book Title: Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
ISBN: 978147985772

Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World (Book)
Title: Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World
Author: Billy G. Smith
Abstract: It is no exaggeration to say that the Hankey, a small British ship that circled the Atlantic in 1792 and 1793, transformed the history of the Atlantic world. This extraordinary book uncovers the long-forgotten story of the Hankey, from its altruistic beginnings to its disastrous end, and describes the ship’s fateful impact upon people from West Africa to Philadelphia, Haiti to London. Billy G. Smith chased the story of the Hankey from archive to archive across several continents, and he now brings back to light a saga that continues to haunt the modern world. It began with a group of high-minded British colonists who planned to establish a colony free of slavery in West Africa. With the colony failing, the ship set sail for the Caribbean and then North America, carrying, as it turned out, mosquitoes infected with yellow fever. The resulting pandemic as the Hankey traveled from one port to the next was catastrophic. In the United States, tens of thousands died in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston. The few survivors on the Hankey eventually limped back to London, hopes dashed and numbers decimated. Smith links the voyage and its deadly cargo to some of the most significant events of the era—the success of the Haitian slave revolution, Napoleon’s decision to sell the Louisiana Territory, a change in the geopolitical situation of the new United States—and spins a riveting tale of unintended consequences and the legacy of slavery that will not die. (Publisher's description)
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/ship-of-death-a-voyage-that-changed-the-atlantic-world/oclc/844073982&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300194524
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Blank Archive (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Blank Archive
Author: Matthew Brown
Abstract: This paper will explore ephemera in British America: its use at the time and its standing now in holdings and collections. Blank forms (single-sheet printing with spaces for handwriting, such as legal forms, indentures, lottery tickets, and so forth) were the bread and butter of colonial printers. Beyond this business interest, how were they valued then and now? Blanks were made to be used: marked up, folded, docketed, torn. This intentional destruction gives pause to the cultural historian interested in questions of value. Yet their role in contracting individuals to the agreed-upon matters involved in the blank form suggests a haunting power in their moment. In book history circles, job printing and blanks have undergone a revitalization of sorts in current scholarship. How might this revitalization challenge literary scholars or how might we reorient questions of value in the worlds of both literary study and textual studies? These will be some of the ideas raised in the talk [ed. note: Jim, you could add to the end of this sentence “drawn from my book project *The Novel and the Blank: Thinking with the Print Shop in British America*"]
Date: 01/08/2014
Conference Name: Modern Language Association Annual Meeting

Bell's Liberties (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Bell's Liberties
Abstract: Public lecture at Rare Book School on the printer of Paine's Common Sense.
Author: Matthew P. Brown
Date: 07/04/12
Location: University of Virginia
Primary URL: http://www.rarebookschool.org/lectures/Brown.mp3

The Whig Interpretation of Media: Sheppard Lee and Jacksonian Paperwork (Article)
Title: The Whig Interpretation of Media: Sheppard Lee and Jacksonian Paperwork
Author: Jordan Alexander Stein
Abstract: Scholars in many different disciplines generally accept that the conceptual abstraction called "the public sphere"—a space of critical self-reflection functioning at least partially independent of state authority—developed coextensively with the rise of print. "Developed coextensively" is, however, somewhat elliptical as a historical explanation; for print—the impression of text and design characters onto paper—is usually taken to be a technology and not an agent. Print cannot be said in any single-handed sense to cause anything, let alone the public sphere.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.3.1.0029?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: History of the Present
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

'In the Midst of Death': When African Americans Saved Our Nation's Capital (Article)
Title: 'In the Midst of Death': When African Americans Saved Our Nation's Capital
Author: Billy Smith
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2019
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (Book)
Title: The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration
Author: Hester Blum
Abstract: From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/news-at-the-ends-of-the-earth-the-print-culture-of-polar-exploration/oclc/1099589573&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-news-at-the-ends-of-the-earth
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4780-038
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Melville in the Arctic (Article)
Title: Melville in the Arctic
Author: Hester Blum
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2018
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Leviathan 20:1

'Bitter with the Salt of Continents': Rachel Carson and Oceanic Returns (Article)
Title: 'Bitter with the Salt of Continents': Rachel Carson and Oceanic Returns
Author: Hester Blum
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2017
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Women's Studies Quarterly 45:1

When Novels Were Books (Book)
Title: When Novels Were Books
Author: Jordan Alexander Stein
Abstract: Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt’s theories to James Watt’s inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female. For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers’ hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature (“character”) that was in fact incubated in religious books. The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel’s main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre’s insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the “media platform” it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987043
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674987043

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