Fellows and Their Topics for the Year 2004-2005

Hilary Ballon
Robert Moses and the Modern City
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow

 

Hilary Ballon is a Professor of Urban Studies and Architecture at New York University, and a Deputy Vice Chancellor of NYU, Abu Dhabi. She is the author of The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism; New York's Pennsylvania Station; and the forthcoming Frank Lloyd Wright's Towers – in connection with which she has curated an exhibition at the Skyscraper Museum in downtown Manhattan in October, 2004. She co-curated an exhibition reassessing the urbanism of Robert Moses in 2006, with installations at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery, the New York Historical Society, and the Queens Museum. At the Library she will use, among other collections, the Robert Moses papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Division.

 

Martha Biondi
The Black Student Movement and the Origins of African American Studies, 1967-1975

 

Martha Biondi is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, specializing in twentieth century African American history. Her first book, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City was published in 2003 by Harvard University Press and won the Thomas J. Wilson Prize as best first book of the year.

 

George Chauncey
The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Stonewall Era

 

George Chauncey is a social and cultural historian whose research and teaching focus on urbanism, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, and the social movements of the twentieth century. He is a Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, which won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Award for the best book in social history and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award. During his fellowship term he will make intensive use of the Library's collections as he extends his work on gay culture in New York City from 1940 to the 1970s.

 

Jennifer Egan
Novel set in New York City
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow

 

Jennifer Egan is the author of two novels, The Invisible Circus and Look at Me (which was a finalist for the National Book Award), and a short story collection, Emerald City. The magazines that have published her short fiction include The New Yorker,Harper's, and Zoetrope, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. At the Cullman Center she will work on a historical novel set in New York City just after the end of World War II.

 

Nathan Englander
Novel set in Argentina

 

Nathan Englander's short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and The Pushcart Prize. His story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kauffman Prize. More recently he was awarded a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Bard Fiction Prize. During his fellowship he will work on a novel.

 

Linda Gordon
Biography of photographer Dorothea Lange

 

Linda Gordon is a Professor of History at New York University. Her work has focused on the historical roots of contemporary social policy debates, particularly as they concern gender and family issues, and more recently on race and gender in the American West. Her numerous books include Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (winner of the Berkshire Prize and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award), and The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, which won both the 2000 Bancroft Prize for the best book in U.S. History and the Beveridge prize for the best book on the history of the Americas. She recently co-edited Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement.

 

Elizabeth Kendall
The Lost Muse: Lydia Ivanova, George Balanchine and the Russian Revolution

 

Elizabeth Kendall writes about dance and culture. She is the author of Where She Danced: The Birth of American Art-Dance; The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s; and American Daughter, a memoir. She has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Bard College, and Smolny College in Russia. Her articles have appeared in a number of publications, including The New Yorker and The New York Times, and she has worked on several documentaries for public television.

 

Stephen Kotkin
Lost in Siberia: Dreamworlds of Eurasia
Joint NYPL/ACLS Fellow

 

Stephen Kotkin is a Professor of European and Asian History at Princeton University, where he directs the Russian Studies Program. As a consultant to businesses and foundations, he has conducted fieldwork in every republic of the former Soviet Union except Turkmenistan. His books include Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 and Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World from the Mongol Empire to the Present (co-author). He received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2004. He is currently writing a history of the Ob River valley that will encompass the histories of the Turkic, Mongol, Russian, Chinese, Manchu and Japanese empires.

 

Hermione Lee
Biography of Edith Wharton
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow

 

Hermione Lee is the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. Her books include The Novels of Virginia Woolf;Elizabeth Bowen; Philip Roth; Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up; and Virginia Woolf. A Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Hilda's and St. Cross College, Oxford, she was in 2003 made a CBE for services to literature and appointed a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is working on a biography of Edith Wharton and on a collection of essays about life-writing.

 

Colum McCann
Zoli: A Story of Europe – A Novel

 

Irish-born Colum McCann is the author of two story collections, Fishing the Sloe-Black River and Everything in the Country Must, and three novels, Songdogs, This Side of Brightness, and Dancer. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and GQ, and received Ireland's Rooney Prize for Literature. While a fellow at the Cullman Center he will work on a novel based on the story of Bronislawa Wajs, a Polish poet and Gypsy.

 

Pankaj Mishra
A Modern Adventure – A Novel

 

Pankaj Mishra is a journalist, travel writer, literary critic, political commentator, and novelist. He contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, and India's Outlook. He is the author ofButter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India and the novel The Romantics; Farrar Straus and Giroux will publish his latest book of non-fiction, The End of Suffering: The Buddha in the World, in the fall of 2004. At the Cullman Center he will work on a novel set in India, New York City, and England.

 

Lisandro Perez
Cuban New Yorkers: The Cuban Community of New York and the Development of the Cuban Nation, 1823-1958
Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow

 

Lisandro Perez is a Professor of Sociology, the Director of the International Migration Initiative, and the founder and former Director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University in Miami. He edits the journal Cuban Studies, co-authored The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States, and is writing the entry on Cuban Americans for the forthcoming reference work The New Americans. At the Cullman Center he will use the Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History, and Genealogy; The Moses Taylor Papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Division; and the Arents Collection.

 

Jose Manuel Prieto
Vox Humana – A Novel
Margaret and Herman Sokol Fellow

 

Jose Manuel Prieto is a Professor of History and editor of Istor, Journal of International History, at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas in Mexico City. Born in Cuba, he spent twelve years training and working as an engineer in the former Soviet Union before beginning a career as a writer and translator. His work, which includes essays, short stories, and translations, has been published all over the world. His novel Livadia appeared in the United States as Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. He received a Latin American Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2002. He will work on a novel at the Cullman Center.

 

Danzy Senna
Where Did You Sleep Last Night? – A Memoir

 

Danzy Senna holds the Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and worked as a researcher and reporter for Newsweek. Her first novel,Caucasia, won the Book of the Month Club's Stephen Crane First Fiction Award, and in 2002 she received the Mrs. Giles Whiting Writer's Award. Her second novel,Symptomatic, will be published in May, 2004. At the Cullman Center she will work on a book about the life of her elusive African-American grandmother.

 

T. J. Stiles
Vanderbilt: The Life and Times of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1794-1877
Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History