NYPL Long-Term Fellowship

The NYPL Long-Term Fellowship supports advanced research at the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities, located in the Library’s flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The Gregorian Center at The New York Public Library is pleased to announce that Alvin Eng has been selected to receive an NYPL Long-Term Fellowship. Eng is a native New York City author, playwright, educator, and acoustic punk raconteur. His memoir Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond was published by Fordham University Press. During his fellowship, Eng will research a memoir/NYC Asian American historical non-fiction book, tentatively titled Urban Oracle Bones, which will adapt and expand one of his stage works, Here Comes Johnny Yen Again. Urban Oracle Bones will examine the profound impact of The Opium Wars and opium on the Chinese diaspora in New York City as well as on the “heroin chic” punk rock counterculture that was so prevalent during Eng’s teenage years in 1970s NYC. This examination will be undertaken through the dual prisms of William S. Burroughs’ character Johnny Yen (immortalized in the Iggy Pop & David Bowie song “Lust For Life") and Eng’s own grandfather’s opium overdose in NYC’s Chinatown in the early 20th Century. As the book’s principle characters bookend the Bowery––Eng’s grandfather in Chinatown and Burroughs in punk rock’s ground zero, the East Village––The Bowery’s history will also be researched to create a metaphoric/geographic bridge between eras, cultures and subcultures.

As an NYPL Long-Term Fellow, Eng will receive a stipend of $45,000 to support his work at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building for a period of nine months.

Previous NYPL Long-Term Fellows

Rachel E. Smith, PhD received an NYPL Long-Term Fellowship for 2023-2024. Dr. Smith is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the history and politics of knowledge production and representation among Sephardic communities in the late Ottoman Empire. Against the backdrop of expanding empires, the rise of anthropology, and shifting notions of race, her research examines how Sephardic writers and thinkers produced, circulated, and mobilized ethnographic and racialized knowledge in the service of various reformist ideologies. She earned her Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2023. She has worked on numerous public history projects including oral history archives, educational programming, and exhibits for the Tenement Museum and the Center for Jewish History in New York, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA.