Fellows and Their Topics for the Year 2002-2003

Donald Antrim
By Proxy, A Novel

 

Donald Antrim is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World,The Hundred Brothers, and most recently, The Verificationist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, which has named him one of 20 Writers for the 21st Century,Harpers, and The Paris Review. He is the recent recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. During his fellowship term at the Center he will be working on his fourth novel.

 

Thomas Bender
A Frame Beyond Itself: Rethinking America's History in a Global Age
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow

 

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. His books include, Toward an Urban Vision, Community and Social Change in America, New York Intellect, and Intellect and Public Life. He has edited The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, City and Nation, and Rethinking American History for a Global Age. His newest book, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea is to be published later this year. His current project seeks to reframe the narrative of American history avoiding the all too common isolation – past and present – of the United States from the larger histories it shares with other societies.

 

Emily Braun
The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow

 

Emily Braun is Professor of Art History at Hunter College and teaches at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism, and co-author of Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, and Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today Murals. Ms. Braun has published in Art in America, Modernism/modernity and the Journal of Contemporary History and is a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford Short History of Italy. She will work on a book about Jewish Women and their salons from the 1780s through the mid-20th century as a privileged site of female power that bridged the private and public spheres.

 

Tom Buk-Swienty
Jacob A. Riis: A Biography

 

Tom Buk-Swienty is a journalist and United States Bureau Chief for the Danish weeklyWeekendavisen, Berlingske.  His bestselling book AmerikaMaxima: Et dansk roadtrip gennem Clinton's USA (AmerikaMMaxima: A Danish Roadtrip through Clinton's USA)has been called the best Danish book on America in the '90s. During his fellowship year at the Center, he will work on a biography of the Danish-American reporter, photographer, and social reformist, Jacob A. Riis.

 

Elisheva Carlebach
Conversion and Subversion: Anti-Christian Strain in Early-Modern Yiddish Culture, 1500-1750

 

Elisheva Carlebach is Professor of History, Queens College, CUNY, and the author ofDivided Souls: Jewish Converts to Christianity in Early Modern German Lands, 1550-1750, and The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies, which won the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish History in 1991. Her project will analyze strategies of Jewish resistance to Christian culture in early modern Central Europe.

 

Caleb Crain
Ned v. Kate: The Divorce of Edwin and Catharine Forrest

 

Caleb Crain is a freelance writer and was a reporter for the magazine Lingua Francafrom 1997 to 2001 and a senior editor there in 1999 and 2000. He has written for theNew York Times Book Review, Newsday, The Nation, and The New Republic and is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation. He has written introductions to forthcoming Modern Library editions of two early American novels, Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown and The Algerine Captive by Royall Tyler.

 

Paul Freedman
Spices in the Middle Ages
Joint NYPL/American Council of Learned Societies Fellow

 

Paul Freedman is Professor of History at Yale University. He has written books on serfdom in Catalonia (The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia, 1991) and on how peasants were portrayed and thought about in medieval Europe as a whole (Images of Medieval Peasant, 2000). During his fellow term at the Center he will work on a book about spices in the Middle Ages and why they were considered so valuable.

 

Bei Ling Huang
"Thank You, Warden!": A Writer's Fifteen Fate-Altering Days in a Chinese Prison

 

Bei Ling Huang, poet and essayist, is the founder and editor of Tendency, an exile literary journal founded in late 1993 and published in Chinese. He is also the Executive Director of the Independent Chinese PEN Center and is on the board of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, and Research Associate at Harvard University Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.

 

Roger Keyes
The Art of Japanese Illustrated Books
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow

 

Roger S. Keyes is Visiting Professor in the History of Art at Brown University, an Associate in Research at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and Director of the Center for the Study of Japanese Prints. His many publications include The Theatrical World of Osaka Prints with Keiko Mizushima, The Art of Surimono, and The Male Journey in Japanese Prints. He has just completed a catalogue raisonnée of the prints of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Japan Foundation. During his Fellowship year, Dr. Keyes will be studying the Spencer Collection of Japanese illustrated books and beginning a book to accompany an important exhibition of this material at The New York Public Library in 2005.

 

Franziska Kirchner
Antebellum Americans in Germany: Transfer of Cultural Knowledge
Director's Fellow

 

Franziska Kirchner, a German art historian, is the author of Central Park, a book about the impact of German garden theory and practice on the design of New York's Central Park, to be published shortly. She is an independent scholar and longtime coordinator of artists' competitions for memorials in Berlin. At the Center she will use the collections to research antebellum Americans' travels to Germany and their interest in the potential of painting and education to strengthen the American national identity.

 

Caryl Phillips
A Fictional Life of Bert Williams
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow

 

Novelist Caryl Phillips is the author of The Final Passage, for which he won the Malcolm X prize, A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River, and The Nature of Blood. His many awards include a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award. He is also the author of several plays, screenplays, numerous reviews and articles and three works of non-fiction, The European Tribe, for which he won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, The Atlantic Sound, and A New World Order: Selected Essays. He is the editor of an anthology of English Literature written by British authors not born in Britain, Extravagant Strangers, and an anthology of writing about tennis, The Right Set. He is Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University.

 

Stacy Schiff
Benjamin Franklin in France
Director's Fellow

 

Stacy Schiff is the author of Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. Her Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography. She is at work on a portrait of Benjamin Franklin in France during the American Revolution. Ms. Schiff has contributed to The New York Times Book Review,The New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and The American Scholar, among other publications. She is the previous recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

Philip Steinberg
Origins of the Territorial State in Early Modern Marine Cartography

 

Philip Steinberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University. He is the author of The Social Construction of the Ocean, as well as the author of journal articles ranging in topic from the history of ocean law to the role of ideology in New England mill village architecture, and from the political economy of global Internet governance to the sense of place held by activists opposing long-distance water transfers. At the Center for Scholars and Writers, he will utilize The New York Public Library's extensive cartographic holdings to study how the mapping of marine space during the 15th through 18th centuries contributed to the formation of the territorial state as a political-geographic norm.

 

Jeremy Treglown
The Career of V.S. Pritchett

 

Jeremy Treglown was Editor of the (London) Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1990, and since 1993 has been a professor of English at the University of Warwick, England, where he currently holds a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. His most recent book, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green, was described in the New York Times as "a model of what literary biography should be." He has written for The New Yorker and Grand Street, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton, the California Institute of Technology, and All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

 

Julia Van Haaften
Berenice Abbott, Photographer
Director's Fellow

 

Julia Van Haaften was the first Curator of Photographs in The New York Public Library's Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs and is currently the Assistant Director of the Digital Library Program. She has curated many exhibitions for the Library and other institutions and is the author of numerous publications including the books Berenice Abbott: Photographer, A Modern Visionand From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography. As a Fellow of the Center, she will complete a biography of Berenice Abbott for publication by Simon & Schuster.