The Library Company of Philadelphia and Historical Society of Pennsylvania

202425 Research Fellows

Long-Term Fellows of the Library Company of Philadelphia

National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellows

Jessie Vander Heide, independent scholar, Bethesda, Maryland (PhD in History, Lehigh University)
Schooling Intimacy: Love, Romance, and Sexuality at American Female Academies, 1780–1870

Hannah Wakefield, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
The Black Church and African American Literature

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Postdoctoral Fellow

Jake Nussbaum, independent scholar, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (PhD in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania)
Beyond Time: Experiments in Performance and Abolition, Philadelphia

Program in Early American Economy & Society Postdoctoral Fellow

Carolyn Zola, independent scholar, San Francisco, California (PhD in History, Stanford University)
Public Women: Urban Provisioners in Nineteenth Century America

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Dissertation Fellows

Jorden E. Sanders, PhD Candidate, Department of English, Rutgers University
Un/Booked and Un/Bound: Retuning the Human in the Soundscape of Early African American Writing

Hampton Smith, PhD Candidate, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Making against Exploitation: Artisanry and Abolition towards the Black Atlantic Commons, 1791–1890

Program in Early American Economy & Society Dissertation Fellow

Eva Landsberg, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Yale University
The Politics of Sugar in the 18th-Century British Atlantic

Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Dissertation Fellow in Women’s History

Emma Chapman, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of California, Davis
Disappearing Connections: Absence, Kin, and Economy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century New France and New England

Short-Term Fellows of the Library Company of Philadelphia

Program in Early American Economy & Society Short-Term Fellows

Andrew Abrams, PhD Candidate, Department of History, College of William & Mary
Days and Hours: Labor, Technology, and Temporality in Early America

Elliot Warren, PhD Candidate, Department of History, College of William & Mary
The Common Hall: Local Leaders and the Development of America’s Political Economy in the Era of the French Revolution, 1786–1800

Andrew Williams, PhD Candidate, Department of History and Archaeology, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica
Merchants of Kingston, Jamaica, 1703–1739

Ke Zhao, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of California, Santa Cruz
American Ginseng in Early Modern Medicine and Trade

Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellows

Erica Duncan, PhD Candidate, Department of History, New York University
Childish Freedoms: Black Children and the Making of Freedom in South Carolina and the Bahamas

Marcus Nevius, Associate Professor, Kinder Institute and Department of History, University of Missouri
Internal Enemy of the Most Alarming Kind: Marronage and the Political Economy of Fear in the British Atlantic in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

Chinaza Amaeze Okoli, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Eastern Kentucky University
Popular Performance Cultures and Black Atlantic Literature, 1750–1830

Gabrielle Straughn, PhD student, Department of History, University of California, Irvine
Mixed-Race Women’s Identities in the United States, 1776–1861 

Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Fellow in Women’s History

Mariah Kupfner, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Heritage, School of Humanities, Penn State Harrisburg
Crafting Womanhood: Needlework, Gender, and Politics in the United States, 1810–1920

William Reese Company Fellow in American Bibliography

David R. Whitesell, independent scholar, Charlottesville, Virginia
A Bibliographical Catalog of Pre-1901 American and Canadian Photographically Illustrated Books

McLean Contributionship Fellow

Mark Noonan, Professor, Department of English, New York City College of Technology-CUNY
Revolutionary Ink: Colonial Printers of New York and the Promise of Democracy

William H. Helfand Fellow in American Medicine, Science, and Society

Don James McLaughlin, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Tulsa
To Sway and Yield: Queer Disabled Intimacies in American Literature, 1782–1932

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Fellow

Amelia Rauser, Charles A. Dana Professor of Art History, Department of Visual Arts, Franklin & Marshall College
The Uniform: Collective Bodies in the Eighteenth Century

William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture

Caroline Murray Culp, Warren Family Assistant Curator, American Folk Art Museum
The Sign in the Painting: Site-Specificity in Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdoms

Anthony N.B. and Beatrice Garvan Fellow in American Material Culture

Mary Kate Robbett, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Northwestern University
Collecting the War: Civil War Relics, 1865–1915

James N. Green Fellow in the History of the Book in America

Kandice Sharren, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Saskatchewan
Politics, Paratexts, and Transatlantic Fiction, 1789–1840

Charles E. Rosenberg Fellow in the History of Health and Medicine

Jane Chang, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Intermingling of the Old and New: The Formation of a New German-American Medical Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (1730–1810)

Short-Term Fellows of the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellows

Thomas Blakeslee, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
Radical Paternity: The Resistant Masculinity of African American Fatherhood from Anti-Slavery to Civil Rights

Alexandra Cade, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Delaware
Schottische at the Spa: Waltz at the Waterfall: Sensory Performance of National Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Tourism

Hsiao-Yun Chu, Professor, School of Design, San Francisco State University
The She-Makers: American Women in Industrial Design, 1848–1914

Emma Jensen, PhD Candidate, Department of Musicology, Florida State University
Fat Musicology: Body Size, Race, and Gender in the Making of U.S. Popular Music, 1850–2023

Mary McAvoy, Associate Professor, School of Music, Dance and Theatre, Arizona State University
A Time to Do Their Part: Women, Children, and Activist Theatres of Display in Pennsylvania’s Early Social Work and Aid Societies, 1820–1860

Courtney Murray, PhD Candidate, Departments of English and African American Studies, the Pennsylvania State University
The Hold: Black Femme Formations of Space, Text, and Being in the Long Nineteenth Century

Nora Rosengarten, PhD Candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
Feeling Pressure: A History of Embossing

Neil Weijer, Curator, the Harold & Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection, University of Florida
The Learning and Labor of the Blind

Barra Foundation International Research Fellow in American History and Culture

Holly Day, Research Associate, University of York
The Pocket Diary in the Transatlantic Print Trade, 1760–1880

Richardson Dilworth Fellow

Henry Dickmeyer, PhD Candidate, Department of History, American University
Policing Freedom: Race, Law, and Urban Statecraft in Philadelphia, 1838–1872

Esther Ann McFarland Fellow

Bethany J. McGlyn, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Virginia
“Work and Be Happy”: Craft, Slavery, and Freedom in Pennsylvania, 1783–1840

Robert L. McNeil Jr. Fellows

Donald Dostie, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Temple University
Necessary Steps: Urban Privies, Social Anxieties, and the Remaking of Philadelphia, 1793–1854

Matthew Grace, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Virginia
Capital, State Power, and the Political Economy of an Industrial Slave State

Rachel Hooper, Professor of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design; incoming Curator, University of Kentucky Art Museum
Black-Owned Art Collections in Philadelphia during the U.S. Civil War Era (c. 1840–1876)

Elise Mitchell, American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Princeton University
Remedies and Relations: Medicine, Slavery, and Freedom in Eighteenth-Century St. Ann, Jamaica

Short-Term Fellows of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Balch Institute Fellows

Cassandra Euphrat Weston, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Michigan
Sexual Dissidence, Jewishness, and American Radicalism, 1900–1930

Amy B. Huang, Assistant Professor, Department of Theater and Dance, Bates College
Theatre History and Recollecting Asian Artistry

Albert M. Greenfield Short-Term Fellow

Patrick McKelvey, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre Arts, University of Pittsburgh
Supporting Actors: A Disability History of Theatrical Welfare in the United States

Indian Rights Association Fellow

Brandon C. Downing, Associate Professor, Department of History, Marietta College
Performative Violence as Political Discourse: Delawares during the Seven Years’ War, 1755–1758