Announcing the 2014-2015 Post-Doctoral Fellows

Samuel Jennings, Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or The Genius of America Encouraging the Emancipation of the Blacks, 1792. Oil on canvas.

The Library Company is pleased to announce the seven recipients of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Program in African American History (PAAH) Mellon Scholars, and Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) post-doctoral fellows for 2014-2015.

PAAH Mellon Fellow Kabria Baumgartner is an Assistant Professor of History at the College of Wooster. She will examine the Library Company’s collection of friendship albums and schoolbooks used by young African American women as she writes her book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: African American Women and Educational Activism in America’s Republic.

NEH Fellow Randy M. Browne is an Assistant Professor of History at Xavier University. During the fall 2014 semester, he will use the Library Company’s collection of rare Caribbean travel narratives and memoirs and printed materials on British abolitionism to transform his dissertation “Surviving Slavery: Politics, Power, and Authority in the British Caribbean, 1807–1834” into a book.

PEAES Fellow Manuel Covo earned his Ph.D. in History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He hopes to transform his dissertation “Trade, Empire, and Revolutions in the Atlantic World: Saint-Domingue, between the Metropole and the United States (1778-1804)” into a book. He plans to study the political economy of the early Republic with material such as the literature surrounding the Jay Treaty controversy unavailable in his native France.

NEH Fellow Benjamin Fagan is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African-American Studies at the University of Arkansas. When he arrives at the Library Company in Spring 2015, he will continue work on his book manuscript “The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation,” which considers the ways in which antebellum black Americans used the newspaper to aid liberation efforts and to express their belief that they were God’s chosen people.

PAAH Mellon Fellow Aston Gonzales is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at University of Michigan. His dissertation “Designing Humanity: African American Activist Art, 1830-1880” examines African American artists’ work that challenged the racial stereotypes depicted in popular culture.

NEH and PEAES Fellow Brian Luskey is an Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University. He will use his year at the Library Company to work on his book Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: The Cultural Economy of the American Civil War. He plans to look at Civil War ephemera such as business trade cards, recruitment posters, and sheet music, and Civil War era newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets that chronicle wartime debates about political economy.

NEH Fellow Nicholas P. Wood is an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He hopes to expand on his dissertation “Considerations of Humanity and Expediency: The Slave Trades and African Colonization in the Early National Antislavery Movement,” which examines the ways in which abolitionists and black activists created a national agenda to end slavery.