Fellows and Their Topics for the Year 2012-2013
American Alchemy: The Vexed Relation of Land and Capital, 1776 – 2008
ACLS/NYPL Fellow
Elizabeth Blackmar, Professor of History at Columbia University, is the author of Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850, and the co-author, with Roy Rosenzweig, of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. She has recently published a number of articles on the history of property rights, family trusts, and Real Estate Investment Trusts. At the Cullman Center, she will be researching and writing a book on the history of real estate investment in the United States from the early republic to the present.
HERZL, script for a feature film on Theodor Herzl
Shimon Dotan is a film director and screenwriter whose films include Hot House, The Smile of the Lamb, and You Can Thank Me Later. Awards for his work include the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and two Israeli Academy Awards. Dotan is a professor at New York University and The New School, where he teaches Political Cinema and Film Directing, respectively. During his time at the Cullman Center, he will work on a script for a feature film about Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism.
Household Spirits: The Life and Work of Shirley Jackson
Ruth Franklin is a literary critic and senior editor at The New Republic, where she has been on staff since 1999. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and Salmagundi, to which she contributes a regular film column. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, was a finalist for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson.
Anthony Gottlieb
The Rise of Reason
Anthony Gottlieb is the author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. He was on the editorial staff of The Economist from 1983 to 2006, including nine years as its Executive Editor. He studied at Cambridge University, was a visiting fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, has taught at the CUNY Graduate Center and the New School, and is a visiting scholar at New York University. His essays and book reviews appear in The New York Times, Intelligent Life, The Economist and The New Yorker. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a sequel to The Dream of Reason, covering the 17th and 18th centuries.
Aftermath
Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a former editor of The Paris Review, and the author of three books: The Ballad Of Abu Ghraib [Standard Operating Procedure], A Cold Case, and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and The New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award. His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a book about life after genocide in Rwanda.
The More Plot in Sin: A Story of Slavery, Deception, and the Making of the Americas
The Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History
Greg Grandin is a Professor of History at New York University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include The Last Colonial Massacre, Empire’s Workshop, and Fordlandia, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a National Book Critic Circles Award. While at the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book about Herman Melville and slavery in the Americas during the Age of Revolution.
Christian Hajjis: Mobility and Status in the Ottoman Empire
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow
Valentina Izmirlieva is Associate Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Columbia University, and the author of All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic. Much of her work addresses cultural transfers among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the context of multi-religious empires. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a book about Christians who modeled their pilgrimage to Jerusalem on the Muslim Hajj to Mecca.
Imagining Natural History: Creativity and the Visual Arts in the Scientific Revolution
The Birkelund Fellow
Dániel Margócsy is Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College, CUNY. He has published articles on cabinets of curiosities, the commercialization of science, the development of taxonomy, and the art of the Dutch Golden Age. He co-edited States of Secrecy, a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Science, on scientific secrets. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book that examines how the creative arts influenced the development of modern science.
The Sport of Kings (fiction)
The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow
C.E. Morgan, a writer and singer, is the author of the novel All the Living. She has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. In 2010, The New Yorker named her one of America’s best young fiction writers in its selection of “20 Under 40.” She holds a degree from the Harvard Divinity School. While at the Cullman Center, she will be writing a novel about horse racing, race relations, and contemporary life in the Ohio Valley and Kentucky, drawing on NYPL materials regarding evolutionary theory, American history, jazz, geology, and animal husbandry.
Yellow and Gold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908
Mae Ngai is Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. She has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on a book about the gold rushes in Pacific settler-colonies, focusing on Anglo-American racial politics and the circulations of Chinese miners.
Jimbo in Paradise
Gary Panter is a painter, cartoonist, and designer whose awards include a Chrysler Design Award and three Emmys. His work has appeared in Time, The New Yorker, Esquire, Raw, Rolling Stone, Artforum, Art In America, among other publications. His written and illustrated graphic novels include Jimbo's Inferno, Jimbo in Purgatory, and Invasion of the Elvis Zombies. Picturebox published a monograph of his art work in 2008. At the Cullman Center, Panter will be exploring imagery and texts relating to ideas of the afterlife and Paradise, especially as they appear in Dante's Paradiso and Milton's Paradise Regained.
James Ryerson
Sidewalk Socrates: The Philosophical Life of Sidney Morgenbesser
James Ryerson is a writer and editor. He has worked at The New York Times Op-Ed page, The New York Times Magazine, Legal Affairs, Lingua Franca, and Feed. He writes frequently about philosophy and has contributed introductory chapters to Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, by David Foster Wallace, and Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a book about the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser.
Declare Present Time Over (fiction)
Lucy Sante has written about urban life, popular culture, photography, crime, and social history for thirty years. Her books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and the forthcoming Paris-Paname. She teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College, and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on Declare Present Time Over, a documentary novel about the end of bohemia, 1979-82.
Five Days in July, a collection of stories (fiction)
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free, for which he received a Whiting Writers’ Award. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. His first book of short stories will be published by The Dial Press in 2013. At the Cullman Center, he will be working on a new book of stories based on the New York City draft riots of 1863.
The Lost Time Accidents (fiction)
The David Ferriero Fellow
John Wray has published three novels – The Right Hand of Sleep, Canaan's Tongue, and Lowboy – which have earned him, among other distinctions, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a KEN fiction award, and the 2010 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. In 2007, Granta included him on its list of best American novelists under the age of 35. In addition to writing fiction, Wray is a regular contributor to Esquire, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine. At the Cullman Center, he will be writing a novel, The Lost Time Accidents, about a century in the life of a family of renegade physicists.