LCP Awards Five Post-Doctoral Fellowships for 2012-13

The Library Company is pleased to announce the recipients of five post-doctoral fellowships for 2012-13.  Four of them are one-semester National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows, and the fifth is a two-semester Program in Early American Economy and Society Fellow. They were selected from among 42 applications.

NEH fellow Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her book Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America won the Modern Language Association’s First Book prize in 2008.   At the Library Company, she will be conducting research for a new book project, “Enchantments: Animacy and Eros in America, 1840-1900.”  She studies texts that envision a world where objects are animated and vitally related to human bodies. Many of these texts are literary (Thoreau, Fuller, Dickinson) but at the Library Company she will focus on the literature of spiritualism and spirit photography, and on geological texts where prehistoric life was envisioned in stone.

NEH fellow Philip J. Stern is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. His book The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India won the 2011 AHA Forkosch Prize. His new project “Municipal Bonds: The Urban Corporation in the Early Modern British Empire” grows out of his first book. It proposes that incorporated cities and towns provided the ideological and institutional foundation for England’s global colonial empire. At the Library Company, he will study the chartering, governance, surveying, and mapping of Philadelphia, a uniquely interesting case given its continually problematic relations with its own residents, proprietors, and rural hinterland, as well as neighboring Native Americans, British colonies, and other European communities inside and beyond the city.

NEH fellow Michael D. Block received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Southern California in 2011 with a dissertation titled “New England Merchants, the China Trade, and the Origins of California,” examining how American involvement in the China trade influenced American commercial activities in California and the Pacific Basin from the 16th to the 19th centuries. At the Library Company, Dr. Block will be expanding the scope of his dissertation to include the understudied participation of Philadelphia merchants in the China trade.

NEH fellow Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire is about to defend her Ph.D. dissertation on “An Art of Translation: French Prints and American Art in the Antebellum and Civil War Era” in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She studies the impact on American visual culture of engraved reproductions of French works of art and French reproductions of American paintings. At the Library Company, Ms. Delamaire will be looking at French-influenced popular images, from Bible illustrations to the cartoons of Thomas Nast; and she will study reproductions of American genre paintings commissioned by the French art publisher Goupil and Company.

PEAES fellow Ariel Ron is currently completing his Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley with a dissertation on “Developing the Country: Scientific Agriculture and the Roots of the Republican Party.” He began his research into antebellum “scientific agriculture” by asking why an overwhelmingly agrarian society voted for a Republican Party which was to usher in the American Industrial Revolution. At the Library Company, Mr. Ron will be expanding his research on the Republican Party’s appeal to northeastern farmers, including the transition in America’s political culture that shifted focus from transatlantic trade to internal American development.