Fellows and Their Topics for the Year 2005-2006

Charlotte Bacon
Surveying with Everest: A Novel

 

Charlotte Bacon, an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, has published three works of fiction: two novels – Lost Geography andThere is Room for You – and a collection of short stories, A Private State. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and won the PEN/Hemingway Prize for First Fiction. At the Cullman Center she will be working on a novel set in India in the 1830s.

 

 Brent Hayes Edwards
Alternate Tracks: The Politics of Experimentation and Collaboration in New York Jazz, 1972-1982

 

Brent Hayes Edwards is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University. His first book, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, won the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. Edwards co-edited the 2004 collection of essays, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, and has since 2001 been co-editor of the journal Social Text.

 

Robert Jenkins
Nationalists, Imperialists and Global Utopias: Mid-20th Century Movements for World Government in India and the United States

 

Robert Jenkins is Professor of Political Science at the University of London. His research has focused on India, particularly the politics of India’s integration into the global economy and its relationship with institutions of global governance. His books include Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India and Reinventing Accountability: Making Democracy Work for Human Development. He has received research grants from the Ford Foundation, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and the British Academy, and has consulted for the UN, the World Bank, and the governments of Germany, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

 

Wendy Lesser
Photography and Non-fiction

 

Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. She is the author of six books of nonfiction, including The Amateur and Pictures at an Execution; her first novel, The Pagoda in the Garden, will be published in October, 2005. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Arts Journalism Program, and a winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

 

Lucy McDiarmid
The Peacock Dinner: Blunt, Yeats, Pound & the Transmission of Culture

 

Lucy McDiarmid is the author of The Irish Art of Controversy, Auden's Apologies for Poetry, and Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars. She co-edited High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture 1889-1939, and Lady Gregory: Selected Writings. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is a Professor of English at Villanova University. At the Cullman Center, she will do research on a testimonial dinner given on January 18, 1914, by W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Lady Gregory in honor of the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

 

Jill McDonough
Dying Game: 50 Executions in American History (Poetry)

 

Jill McDonough's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and Slate. She received her M. A. from Boston University's Creative Writing Program in poetry in 1998, and has received fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A 2005 PEN/New England Discovery Award winner, she teaches writing for Boston University's Prison Education Project.

 

Andrew Meier 
The American Professor: A Biography of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York Intellectual turned Stalinist Secret Agent
Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow

 

Andrew Meier, Moscow correspondent for Time magazine from 1996 to 2001, is the author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall. A contributor toHarper’s, The Financial Times Magazine, and National Geographic, he writes widely on Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

 

Mary Morrissy
The Duchess: A Novel Exploring the Life of Sean O’Casey’s Sister, Bella

 

Mary Morrissy is the author of a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye and two novels, Mother of Pearl and The Pretender. Her stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, and Mother of Pearl was shortlisted for The Whitbread Prize. She received a Lannan Award for Literature in 1995. Morrissy, who lives in Ireland, has worked as a journalist and fiction reviewer, and has taught in creative writing programs at the Universities of Arkansas and Iowa.

 

Joseph O’Connor
Redemption: A Novel of Irish immigrants, especially children, in the American Civil War

 

Joseph O’Connor’s novels include Cowboys and Indians, Desperadoes, The Salesman,Inishowen, and Star of the Sea, which was published in 26 languages and received the Prix Littéraire Européan Madeleine Zepter for European novel of the year, Ireland’s Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Literary Award, the Irish Post Award for Fiction, France’s Prix Millepages, a Nielsen-BookScan Golden Book Award, and an American Library Association Notable Book listing. O’Connor, who lives in Dublin, has also written short stories, film scripts, plays, and a critical biography of the poet Charles Donnelly.

 

Samuel Roberts
Migrant Labor and Public Health in Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, 1850-1945

 

Samuel Roberts is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University and Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. His forthcoming book,Infectious Fear: Tuberculosis, Public Health, and the Logic of Race and Illness in Baltimore, Maryland, 1880-1930, explores public health and urban politics in the Jim Crow South. In 2001-2002, Roberts was a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Black History and Culture (New York City).

 

Raymond Scheindlin
The Pilgrimage Poetry of Judah Halevi

 

Raymond Scheindlin is Professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a former provost of the Seminary. He specializes in the encounter of Hebrew and Arabic cultures in the Middle Ages, especially as embodied in the poetry of the two traditions. His books include Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life, which deals with medieval secular poetry, and The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul, which deals with medieval religious poetry—as well as a verse translation of the Book of Job. As a Cullman Center fellow, he will be writing about the Jewish and Islamic roots of the pilgrimage poetry of Judah Halevi (d. 1141).

 

Rebecca Read Shanor
Building New York City, 1626-2006

 

Rebecca Read Shanor, who writes about New York City history, architecture, and urban planning, is the author of The City That Never Was: 200 Years of Plans That Might Have Changed the Face of New York. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

 

Kirk Davis Swinehart
Molly’s War: The Other American Revolution
Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History

 

Kirk Davis Swinehart, Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University, is writing a book about the soldier-adventurer Sir William Johnson and his feuding families, Irish and Mohawk, both of which fought for Britain during the American Revolution. Among other things, the book will examine Johnson’s twenty-year relationship with a Mohawk woman—Molly Brant—and her struggle to maintain the Mohawks’ alliance with George III. Swinehart has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon and Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundations.

 

Judith Walkowitz
Cultural Geography of London's West End, 1890-1939

 

Judith R. Walkowitz is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches British and Women's history. Her research and writing have concentrated on the cultural and social contests over sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (winner of the Berkshire Prize) and City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London.

 

Edmund White
Hotel de Dream: A Novel about Stephen Crane

 

Edmund White has written twenty books, including a long biography of Jean Genet (for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and a short life of Proust. He is best known for his trilogy of novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. He directs the creative writing program at Princeton. His most recent book was Fanny: A Fiction, a historical novel about Frances Wright and Frances Trollope.