Fellows and Their Topics for the Year 1999-2000
Sven Beckert
Merchants in the Atlantic World During the Age of Revolution
Merchants in the Atlantic World During the Age of Revolution
Sven Beckert, Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University, is a recent recipient of the Aby-Warburg Foundation prize for academic excellence and a fellow-ship from the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard. He has written and lectured extensively and internationally on business, economic, and labor history. Merchants in the Atlantic World During the Age of Revolution will examine how an economically and socially integrated, cosmopolitan, internationalist, and liberal merchant community emerged and influenced the promulgation of liberal thought between the years 1770 and 1850.
Paul Berman
A Literary and Political History of the Nicaraguan Revolution
A Literary and Political History of the Nicaraguan Revolution
Political and cultural critic, journalist, and intellectual historian, Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias:The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 and a children's book called Make-Believe Empire. He is also the editor of two readers,Blacks and Jews and Debating P.C. A former MacArthur Fellow, Village Voicecolumnist, and New Yorker staff writer, he is a frequent contributor to such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. Mr. Berman's current project is a unique study of the dynamic relationship between Nicaragua's literary traditions and its political left that resulted in the Sandinista revolution of 1979.
D. Graham Burnett
Maps and Clocks: The Meaning of the Models for Space and Time
Maps and Clocks: The Meaning of the Models for Space and Time
D. Graham Burnett, former Mellon Fellow in History at Columbia University, is an historian of science. His primary research examines the role of the geographical sciences in European colonialism, but he has also worked on Charles Darwin, the history of exploration, and 17th-century optics. His first book, El Dorado on Paper, will be published by the University of Chicago Press next year. He will use the fellowship to do a close examination of a range of 16th- and 17th-century maps in the Library's collections, part of a larger project on the relationship between maps and clocks, the two fundamental artifacts for thinking about the two fundamental axes of human experience: space and time. Mr. Burnett was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was awarded the 1999 Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography. His reviews and essays have appeared in The Economist, The American Scholar and the Times Literary Supplement. In the autumn of 2000 Mr. Burnett will join the faculty of the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma.
Kathleen Neal Cleaver
Memories of Love and War
Memories of Love and War
The first woman on the Black Panthers' central committee and former wife of Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Neal Cleaver was at the center of much of the tumultuous political activity of 1960s America. Now a lawyer and senior lecturer and research fellow at Emory University School of Law, she is writing a memoir spanning the time of her family's move from Alabama to India in the 1950s, through the subsequent years of revolution and exile, and concluding with her enrollment in Yale Law School in the 1980s. Professor Cleaver has lectured at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Emory University School of Law, and was Judicial Clerk for the Hon. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals. She is the recipient of fellowships from The Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University, and The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Pamela Clemit
The Literary Lives of William Godwin
The Literary Lives of William Godwin
Dr. Pamela Clemit is currently Reader in English at the University of Durham, UK, and holder of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Her publications include The Godwinian Novel (Oxford English Monographs). She has edited five volumes in The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, one volume in The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, and two volumes in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, all in the Pickering Masters series. She has also published paperback editions of Godwin's St. Leon (Oxford) and Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story(Penguin). Her volume on Godwin in the Pickering & Chatto series, Lives of the Great Romantics, was published in June 1999. During her fellowship at the Library she will be working on an intellectual biography of Godwin for Oxford University Press. Using archival resources in the Library's Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, she will produce the first comprehensive study of Godwin's life, works, and contexts across the full six decades of his literary career.
Andrew Delbanco
Melville's World
Melville's World
Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, writes frequently on American culture and as a literary critic for many national journals and papers including The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now,The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, and The Puritan Ordeal. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope will be published in October by Harvard University Press. Melville's World, to be written under the auspices of a joint fellowship with The American Council of Learned Societies, will propose that its subject was not only a prose master but also the most vivid and intelligent witness of his times. Andrew Delbanco is Vice President of PEN American Center, a Trustee of the National Humanities Center, and a member of the Society of American Historians.
Gregory K. Dreicer
Architecture of Segregation
Architecture of Segregation
Gregory K. Dreicer is on the faculty of the Center for New Design in the Parsons School of Design. At the Library, he will focus on Architecture of Segregation, a book, traveling exhibition, and Internet and film project. It will explore how racial attitudes shaped the urban, suburban, and rural environments that reinforce divisions between whites and blacks in American society. Dr. Dreicer has created exhibitions and publications including Between Fences, a cultural history of fences and land use, andBarn Again!, an examination of barns, agriculture, and contemporary society, which is currently touring the United States. He was recently a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Senior Fellow at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution.
Christian Fleck
Destruction and Reconstruction of Academic Life: The Emigration of German-Speaking Social Scientists During the Nazi Seizure of Power
Destruction and Reconstruction of Academic Life: The Emigration of German-Speaking Social Scientists During the Nazi Seizure of Power
Christian Fleck, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Graz, Austria, is working on a comprehensive history and sociology of the acculturation and influence of the several hundred social scientists who were forced to leave Europe during the 1930s. A much-published writer and editor in the social and political sciences, Dr. Fleck has served as lecturer at the University of Vienna and at the University of Salzburg, and was a recent Fulbright and Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard University.
Anthony Holden
Leigh Hunt: Relations with Shelley, Keats & Their Circle
Leigh Hunt: Relations with Shelley, Keats & Their Circle
Author and journalist Anthony Holden has recently completed a life of Shakespeare, which follows noted biographies of subjects including Sir Laurence Olivier, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Prince Charles. His eclectic writings extend from translations of classical poetry and opera librettos to a book on professional poker playing. A contributor to publications including Punch, New Statesman, Spectator, and National Geographic, Mr. Holden was previously staff writer and Atticus columnist for The London Sunday Times. During his Fellowship at the Library, he will use the Carl H. Pforzheimer collection of Shelley and His Circle to research the first full-scale biography of the poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), which has been commissioned by Little, Brown.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Director's Fellow
Director's Fellow
Ada Louise Huxtable is an architectural historian and critic who served as Architecture Critic of The New York Times from 1963 to 1982. As the first person to hold the position on an American newspaper, she established the journalistic coverage of architecture, preservation, and the urban environment and received the first Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. She has been a Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981. Currently she is the Architecture Critic of The Wall Street Journal. Her books include Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?; Kicked a Building Lately?; Architecture, Anyone?; and most recently, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion. She will devote her Fellowship to investigating the work of a younger generation of American architects who are exploring new ideas and directions in design.
Marion Kaplan
Director's Fellow
Director's Fellow
Marion Kaplan, Professor of History at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is a social and cultural historian, with an emphasis on women's history. Dr. Kaplan's writings include The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Juedischer Frauenbund, 1904-1938; When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (editor); The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History (editor); The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany; and most recently Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, which won the National Jewish Book Award for 1998. She will work on two projects during her fellowship residency,Ordinary Jews and Ordinary Germans: 1933-1941 and Daily Life of Jews in Imperial Germany.
Allen Kurzweil
The Grand Complication
The Grand Complication
Allen Kurzweil was named a "Best Young American Novelist" by Granta for his first novel, A Case of Curiosities, published in 1992. The journalist-turned-fiction-writer is currently at work on a second novel, set in a research institution with special collections that mirror those found in The New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Mr. Kurzweil is the previous recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Youth Grant Fellowship. He lives in Massachusetts.
Howard Markel
Immigration and the Public Health in American Society, 1880 to Present
Immigration and the Public Health in American Society, 1880 to Present
Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases and Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. In addition to numerous articles for publications ranging from The Lancet to The Washington Post, Dr. Markel is the author of Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892; The Practical Pediatrician: The A to Z Guide to Your Child's Health, Behavior and Safety; The Portable Pediatrician; and The H.L. Mencken Baby Book. A practicing pediatrician, Dr. Markel is the recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar Award and the Shannon Director's Award of the National Institutes of Health. In 1999, he was named a Centennial Historian of the City of New York. He will devote his fellowship to a study of the interactions of American immigration, nativism, and public health over the past 120 years.
Francine Prose
Director's Fellow
Director's Fellow
Francine Prose is the author of nine novels, two story collections, and the recent collection of novellas, Guided Tours of Hell. Her stories and essays have appeared inThe Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, and other publications. She writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal. The winner of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, two NEA grants, and a PEN translation prize, she has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. A film based on her novel Household Saintswas released in 1993. Ms. Prose's other novels include Judah the Pious, Bigfoot Dreams, Primitive People, and A Peaceable Kingdom.
Harvey Sachs
The Correspondence of Arturo Toscanini
The Correspondence of Arturo Toscanini
Independent scholar Harvey Sachs was a professional conductor for a dozen years before dedicating himself exclusively to writing. His books include the biographiesToscanini and Rubinstein: A Life and Virtuoso, an examination of the careers of nine celebrated instrumentalists; and Music in Fascist Italy. He co-authored the memoirs of Placido Domingo and Sir Georg Solti, and his writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications. He has previously held a Guggenheim Fellowship. Mr. Sachs has been commissioned by Knopf to prepare the first volume of Toscanini's correspondence ever undertaken, and he is doing this with the cooperation of the Toscanini family. The great part of this correspondence is in the Library's collections.