2024-25 Awarded Fellowships

Previously awarded fellowships: 2023–24 | 2022–23 | 2021–22 | 2020–21 | 2019–20 | 2018–19 | 2017–18 | 2016–17 | 2015–16 | 2014–15

Long-Term Awards

R. STANTON AVERY DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

Susan Scott Parrish, Professor, English, University of Michigan

Topic: The Talking Woods: Black American Life and Its Forest Materials

Scotti Parrish is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the English Department and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. Since the 1990s, she has been researching and teaching about the intertwined history of environmental transformation and racial formation in North America, with an ongoing focus on the southern plantation complex. In her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), she analyzed how English colonials, Native Americans, and captive Africans responded to their environmental dislocations in the Americas, and to colonization and slavery, through their interactions with—and knowledge about—the natural world. Her next book continued to examine how American environments and racialized experiences were mutually constituted. The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017) investigated how a massive infrastructural catastrophe in the Lower Mississippi Valley unfolded, and took on divergent meanings, as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides, and across the color line. More recently, she has edited The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Environment and the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Prompted by contemporary Black artists now reimagining historical Black experiences in U.S. woodlands, she is researching her next book: The Talking Woods: Black American Life and Its Forest Materials. She has received support from the American Antiquarian Society, the NEH, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and UM’s Institute for the Humanities.

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FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

Susan Amussen, Professor, History, UC Merced

Topic: Placing Patriarchy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire

Susan D. Amussen is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California Merced. She is a historian of early modern Britain and its empire. Her works include An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (1988); Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700 (2007); and Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560-1640 (2017). She serves as co-editor of volume 3 (1500-1750) of the New Cambridge History of Britain, which will be published in 2025. While at The Huntington, she will be working on a project entitled “Placing Patriarchy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire” which is a long-term exploration of how patriarchy functions as a system in early modern England, and how it adapts and evolves in relation to other social systems. During the fellowship year, she will be focusing particularly on interactions between patriarchy and race, particularly through the young boys who appear in late 17th century portraits of noble women.

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ROBERT C. RITCHIE DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

Serena Zabin, Professor, History, Carleton College

Topic: American Affections: The Life of Mary Fish Noyes Silliman Dickinson, 1736-1818

Serena Zabin is a Professor of History at Carleton College where she teaches classes in early American and public history. Professor Zabin is the author, most recently, of the prizewinning The Boston Massacre: A Family History (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), which was also named an Amazon Editor’s Choice for History in 2020. She has also written two other books about early America: Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings (Bedford St. Martins, 2004). She is currently co-editing a new collection of essays, Underrepresented Voices of the American Revolution. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies among other grants. She is also the Immediate Past President of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.

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ROGERS DISTINGUISHED FELLOW IN 19TH-CENTURY AMERICAN HISTORY

Megan Kate Nelson, Writer and Historian, History

Topic: The Westerners: Creating America’s Most Iconic Region

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist who writes about the complex histories of American landscapes, and how people have used them to shape local, regional, and national identities. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022; winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction) and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History), as well as Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia 2012) and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia 2005). During her fellowship year, Dr. Nelson will finish writing a book entitled The Westerners: Creating America's Most Iconic Region (to be published by Scribner in fall 2025). She also writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and TIME.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES DISTINGUISHED FELLOW

Nayan Shah, Professor, American Studies, University of Southern California

Topic: Asian American Visual Imagination and Belonging

Nayan Shah is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian whose books uncover how people struggle with migration, illness, incarceration and belonging in the United States and across the globe. He is the author of two award-winning books on Asian American experience in the North American West: Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (California 2001) and Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (2012). His latest book Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (University of California Press, 2022) is the first global history of hunger strikes as a tactic in prisons, conflicts, and protest movements. He is working on a new project on migration and art-making and examines the ways that Asian diasporic artists forge relationships of belonging, refuge and vulnerability in the natural world through artistic practices of photography, painting, installation, dance and performance. Shah has received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities. He is featured in PBS documentaries on “Asian Americans” (2020) and “Plague at the Golden Gate” (2022). He has worked with the National Park Service, Angel Island Foundation, California Historical Society, and Smithsonian Institution to interpret Asian American past and present. He is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and a member of the Society of American Historians. He serves on the boards of Los Angeles’ East West Players, and OutHistory, a resource for scholarship and learning in U.S. LGBTQ+ history.

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CEDARS SINAI/HUNTINGTON LIBRARY POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW

Christin Zurbach, PhD Candidate, History, UC Berkeley

Topic: Doctoring Society: The Professionalization of Ottoman Medicine

Christin Zurbach is a socio-political historian of medicine and minorities. She received her doctorate from the History Department at the University of California – Berkeley in 2024. Fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Modern Greek Studies Foundation supported her research for her dissertation in Turkey and Greece, along with further grants and seminars. Her dissertation, “Doctoring Society: The Transformation of Late Ottoman Medical Professionalization,” focused in particular on the relationship between changes within Ottoman medical training and practice, socio-political transformations of the “Tanzimat” (lit. reorganization), and intercommunal dynamics amongst Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish medical professionals. At the Huntington and Cedars Sinai, she will be expanding the scope of her dissertation to explore further institutional and interpersonal connections between the Ottoman empire and other states, including but not limited to France, Greece, and the United States.

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DIBNER RESEARCH FELLOWS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Alani Hicks-Bartlett, Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, Brown University

Topic: Writing the Disabled Self in Early Modern Literature: Petrarch, Montaigne, Cervantes

Alani Hicks-Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, Hispanic Studies, and Affiliated Faculty of Italian Studies at Brown University. She holds a Joint Ph.D. in Medieval Studies and Romance Languages (Spanish & Portuguese) from UC Berkeley, and earned a Doctorate in Modern Languages (Italian) from Middlebury College. Her research focuses on disability, histories of science and medicine, gender, race, and authorship in the premodern period, along with their various intersections. Her recent work has appeared in MLN, European History Quarterly, Bulletin of the Comediantes, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, and L’Esprit Créateur, among others. At the Huntington, she will be completing her manuscript, Writing the Disabled Self in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Petrarch, Montaigne, Cervantes. The book centers the Medieval and Early Modern connection between physical health, political health, and disability by prioritizing disability, illness, and the attention to autobiography and self-representational techniques that the Humanist and Early Modern authors Petrarch, Montaigne, and Cervantes feature in their works.

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DIBNER RESEARCH FELLOWS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Jeannie Shinozuka, Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies, Washington State University

Topic: Model Minority Intelligence: Race, Education & Citizenship, 1910-1965

Jeannie Shinozuka is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and the Arnold and Atsuko Craft Professor at Washington State University. Her research interests center on Asian American studies and history, environmental history, and the history of medicine and science. Her first book, Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), received honorable mentions for the interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary studies category from the Association for Asian American Studies, the Frederick Jackson Turner award from the Organization of American Historians and was shortlisted for the International Convention of Asia Scholars: ICAS Book Prize-Humanities. She is currently working on two book projects. Global Biotic Borders: Race and Asian Insect and Plant Migration in an International Context is on recent Asian biological invasions in Europe and Latin America, including the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) and Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphornina citri Kuwayama or ACP). Model Minority Intelligence: Scientific Racism, Education, and Citizenship, 1910-1965 is on the relational racial construction of Asian American and African American students in the early twentieth century in order to better understand the interrelationship between intelligence testing, eugenic racism, and affirmative action both in the US and in a transnational perspective. At the Huntington Library, she will work on Model Minority Intelligence

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DANA AND DAVID DORNSIFE FELLOW

Cori Tucker-Price, Fellow, Religious Studies, University of Southern California

Topic: In the Land of Milk and Honey: Democratic Religion and the Forging of Black Resistance in Los Angles, 1903-1953

Cori Tucker-Price is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows of the Humanities at the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching focus on African American history, religion and the American West, religion and media, and migration studies. At the Huntington, she will be working on her first book project, In the Land of Milk and Honey: Democratic Religion and the Forging of Black Resistance in Los Angeles, 1903-1953, which traces the historical and social forces that shaped the practices of African American religious institutions in Southern California. Her work has appeared in the Pacific Historical Review and has been supported by various funding bodies, including the Crossroads Project at Princeton University via the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Prior to her appointment at USC, she was the Guarini Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration in the U.S. Context at Dartmouth College.

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FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION FELLOW

Erik Linstrum, Associate Professor, History, University of Virgina

Topic: Futurelands: Britain, Europe, and the World at the End of Empire

Erik Linstrum is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on modern Britain, imperialism, and decolonization. His current book project, Futurelands, explores Britain’s relationship with the twentieth-century world through ideas about space and experiences of place. He is the author of Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), which won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. His research has been recognized with awards from the Forum for History of Human Science and the North American Conference on British Studies and supported by fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute of Historical Research in London, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

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KEMBLE FELLOW IN MARITIME HISTORY

Adam Domby, Associate Professor, History, Auburn University

Topic: Freedom’s War on the Waters: The Forgotten Story of How African Americans Won the Civil War at Sea and Saved the Union

Adam H. Domby is an award-winning historian of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the American South and an associate professor of history at Auburn University. He is the author of The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (UVA Press, 2020) which examines the intersection of lies and white supremacy in how white southerners recalled the Civil War. His research and writing have covered a wide range of topics including divided communities during Reconstruction, prisoners of war, guerrilla warfare, southern Jews, and slavery on college campuses. He coedited Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later (Fordham University Press, 2021) and his publications have appeared in a variety of outlets including the Journal of Southern History, Civil War History, Black Perspectives, and the Washington Post. He is currently working on a coauthored history of African Americans at Monocacy Battlefield for the National Park Service. At the Huntington he will be examining the role of African American sailors during the Civil War.

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MELLON FELLOW

Patricia Yu, Assistant Professor, History of Art/Architecture, Kenyon College

Topic: Reproducing the Fragmented Body of the Garden of Perfect Brightness

Patricia J. Yu is Assistant Professor of Art History at Kenyon College, where she teaches courses on the arts of Asia, art in cross-cultural translation, the themed landscape, and issues of cultural heritage. Her book project, Reproducing the Fragmented Body of the Garden of Perfect Brightness, extends the study of the afterlives of this imperial garden of the Qing dynasty beyond its original site in Beijing. As a space of ruin, the garden has been reconstituted through acts of architectural and artistic copying that translate its recovered form into alternative spatial contexts. This project addresses the multiple translations of the ruined garden into the spaces of diplomacy, theme park, and art gallery. Before joining Kenyon, she was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute for the “Iconoclasm” Scholar Theme, a curatorial fellow in Asian export art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and a graduate intern with Getty Research Institute Publications. She earned her PhD in art history from the University of California, Berkeley.

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MOLINA FELLOW IN THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE & ALLIED SCIENCES

Jonathan Hsy, Professor, English, George Washington University

Topic: Crafty Mobilities: Disability, Life Writing, and a Global Middle Ages

Jonathan Hsy is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he is Affiliated Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. His work often asks how critical theory and cultural analysis reshape our understandings of language, gender, and identity; his current book project at the Huntington explores diverse forms of autobiographical writing about disability, from the Middle Ages to the present. Hsy is the author of Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter (2021, now open access) and co-editor of A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages (2020). He is a founding Executive Board Member of RaceB4Race (a research and mentorship network led by premodernists who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and he has served on the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. Hsy’s publications on disability and life writing have appeared in the Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Early Modern Women Journal, Journal of American Ethnic History, and postmedieval. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Folger Shakespeare Library, and Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

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NEH FELLOWS

Devoney Looser, Professor, English, Arizona State University

Topic: The Stunning Gunnings: Two Generations of Enterprising Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Who Riveted the Public and Transformed Troubled Lives into Bestselling Fiction

Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author or editor of eleven books on women’s writing, most recently Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (2022). That biography was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Public Scholar Award, and a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship. Her book Wild for Austen will be published in 2025, to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Looser is also the author of The Making of Jane Austen (2017) and the editor of The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes (2019). Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times, Salon, Slate, the TLS, and the Washington Post. Her audio-video lecture series on Austen is available through Wondrium, The Great Courses, and Audible. The project she’ll be at work on at the Huntington is a group biography, The Stunning Gunnings: Two Generations of Enterprising Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Who Riveted the Public and Transformed Troubled Lives into Bestselling Fiction.

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NEH FELLOWS

Tara Lyons, Associate Professor, English, Illinois State University

Topic: Her Books: Women’s Libraries in an Age of Rebellion (1640-1660)

Tara L. Lyons is a professor of English at Illinois State University where she teaches early modern English literature, bibliography, and Shakespeare. Dr. Lyons’ research delves into newly uncovered sources that document women’s books and libraries in the British Isles and colonies from 1640 to 1660. In this period, women’s libraries were conceptualized as contained domestic spaces, protected from ongoing military conflicts, political uprisings, and colonial violence. However, documentary evidence from this period reveals that women’s libraries became targets of disorder and violence. Lyons’ research demonstrates how these libraries were affected and how women’s books, literally and figuratively, fueled the fires of the age. By interrogating what we know about women’s libraries, how such knowledge was obscured, and how we can continue to uncover it, Lyons’ project offers well-plied feminist historiographical practices from which richer histories of “her books” can emerge. Lyons’ scholarship on bibliography and early modern literature has been published in Shakespeare Quarterly, PBSA, ELR, Philological Quarterly, and a number of edited collections. Her work has been supported by grants from the Folger and Bodleian Libraries, and she is the Katharine Pantzer Senior Fellow in the British Book Trades for 2024-2025, awarded by the Bibliographical Society of America.

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SHAPIRO CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY & CULTURE FELLOW

Alison Hirsch, Associate Professor, Architecture, University of Southern California

Topic: The Other California: Land, Loss, Labor, and Liberated Futures Along Phantom Shores

Alison B. Hirsch is a landscape historian and designer. She is Associate Professor in the USC School of Architecture and Director/Founder of the Landscape Justice Initiative. Dr. Hirsch was the 2017-2018 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and directed the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program at USC from 2019 to 2023. Author of books and publications primarily on urban landscapes and spatial politics, Alison’s fellowship year at the Huntington Library will be focused on a forthcoming book, titled The Other California: land, labor, and liberated futures along phantom shores, that builds on five years of action research in design, planning and community history work in the Tulare Lake Basin, the lower third of the Great Central Valley. After fourteen atmospheric rivers hit California in March 2023, as another expression of climate whiplash, Tulare Lake remerged, provoking new imaginaries for the future of its existence and the existence of those who call the lake home. Materially and culturally shaped by the geographic condition of this endorheic basin and its disappeared lake that haunts the land by its periodic reemergence, this narrative is a cultural and environmental history of violence and vast inequality created by 150-years of capitalist agriculture, as well as a story of resistance and how land-based practices of insurgent cultural expression have set the foundation for liberated futures. As a landscape historian and landscape designer, Alison will tell this story as a record of human relations to the uniqueness of this physical landscape and a guide on how to support radical change at a pressing moment, as well as provide broader visibility to processes of land loss, structural violence, critical forms of land-based cultural resistance, and methods of repair that have created conditions for the implementation of more just futures.

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BARBARA THOM POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS

Christine Garnier, Fellow, History of Art/Architecture, University of Southern California

Topic: The American Silverscape: Art, Land, and Extraction

Christine Garnier is an art historian of modern and contemporary North America. Her research investigates how objects recalibrate power relations between Indigenous and settler artists to reveal histories of extraction, transcultural circulation, and ecologies throughout the American West. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. At the Huntington, Dr. Garnier will continue to revise her first book manuscript, “The American Silverscape: Art, Land, and Extraction (1848–1905).” This project explores how nineteenth-century silver artworks became flashpoints in debates over land use, natural resources, and Indigenous sovereignty in the United States. A range of silver artworks—presentation vases, exposition monuments, peace medals, soup tureens, and squash blossom necklaces—are resituated within place-based histories of extraction to demonstrate how objects relayed Indigenous protest to land seizure. Short essays on contemporary artworks between historical chapters reveal the legacies of extraction that extend far beyond silver’s decorative forms. By focusing on intersecting histories of aesthetics, ecologies, politics, and value, “The American Silverscape” proposes an art history particular to the mineral foundations of the American West.

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BARBARA THOM POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS

Laura Nelson, Fellow, Humanities, University of Southern California

Topic: After School: Radical Experiments in Education and Collective Life

Laura Nelson has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University and a M.St. in Literature from Oxford University, where she studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. At the Huntington, she will be working on a book, After School: Reimagining Education Through Radical Experiments in Study, which looks at histories radical and experimental education. Over the past seven years, Laura has taught courses on literature, film, cultural history, and education at Harvard, Deep Springs College, and Tidelines Institute. Alongside teaching and research, she organizes experimental spaces of gathering and learning in cities and has been a part of collective projects including the Library of Study, the Oakland Summer School, and Place Settings.

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BARBARA THOM POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS

Dominique Polanco, Assistant Professor, Religion and Culture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Topic: Copying the Colony: The Pintura del gobernadora, alcaldes y regidores de México’s Many Editions Manuscript

Dominique E. Polanco is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. She is an art historian of Indigenous visual and material culture in Abya Yala. She specializes in amoxtli (books or manuscripts) created by Nahua tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) in sixteenth-century New Spain (colonial Mexico). At the Huntington Library, she will complete revisions for her first monograph tentatively titled Copying the Colony: The Pintura del gobernador, alcaldes y regidores de México’s Many Editions. In it she explores the production, collection, display, and reproduction of the Pintura del gobernador, alcaldes y regidores de México that was completed in 1565. She has published in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture and along with Nicholas R. Jones and Christina H. Lee, Dr. Polanco is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Race in the Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production (forthcoming 2025). Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships and institutions, most recently by the Bibliographical Society of America-Pine Tree Foundation of New York and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. Dr. Polanco earned her PhD in Art History from the University of Arizona and her MA in Art History at UC Riverside. She is thrilled to return to where she was born and raised for her fellowship, on the ancestral lands of the Gabrieleno/Tongva Nation (part of which is now known as the San Gabriel Valley).

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OCCIDENTAL/BILLINGTON VISITING PROFESSOR IN U.S. HISTORY

Damon Akins, Professor, History, Guilford College

Topic: Las Californias: A Brief History Beyond the Missions, 1821-54

Damon Akins is Lincoln Financial Professor of History at Guilford College. He writes and teaches about the history of Indigenous People, settler colonialism, California, and the American West. His current book project is a history of Alta and Baja California during the Mexican period which challenges the emphasis historians have often placed on the struggle between the missions and the Californios. Instead, it takes a place-based spatial history approach to attempt to capture the lived experiences of the diverse Indigenous peoples who constituted the vast majority of the people who lived in the Californias at that time. He is the co-author, with William J. Bauer, Jr., of We Are the Land: A History of Native California (California, 2021).

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FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION FELLOW IN THE HUNTINGTON-UC PROGRAM FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE HUMANITIES

Alex Mazzaferro, Assistant Professor, English, UCLA

Topic: The Innovation Prohibition and the New Science of Politics in Colonial America

Alexander Mazzaferro is the 2024-2025 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow in The Huntington-UC Program for the Advancement of the Humanities. He specializes in colonial American and early U.S. literatures, at the intersection of the history of political thought and the history of science. He is currently at work on a book manuscript that rereads New World settler colonialism and the resistance it met in light of the early modern prohibition on innovation, a pejorative seventeenth-century synonym for rebellion and heresy. The book argues that innovation’s increasing allure, within a culture nominally hostile to it, gave rise to a new way of making knowledge about politics: an experiential mode modelled on empirical natural science that was more amenable to improvisation and experiment than prevailing forms of political reasoning. Colonialism helped to transform innovation into a preeminent Western value—but only through a transgressive remaking of existing lifeways and landscapes that gave anticolonial dissidents of various kinds a surprising ethical high ground in the period. While at The Huntington he will also begin researching a second project on the role that key colonizer technologies like books, guns, compasses played in scripting settler encounters with Native and African people and shaping early ideologies of racial difference. His research has appeared in Early American Literature, J19, and English Language Notes and has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Chicago’s Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.

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FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION FELLOW IN THE HUNTINGTON-UC PROGRAM FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE HUMANITIES

Nydia Pineda de Ávila, Assistant Professor, History, UC San Diego

Topic: Creating Celestial and Terrestrial Environments in the Early Californias.

Nydia Pineda de Ávila is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Associate Director of Latin American Studies and core faculty of the Science Studies Program at UC San Diego. Born in Mexico, she studied a BA in French Literature at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and went on to complete a Masters in Research and a PhD in English at Queen Mary, University of London. She was a post-doctoral fellow in Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (UNAM), and has held fellowships at the Linda Hall Library, Università Ca’ Foscari (Venice, Italy), and the John Carter Brown Library, where she co-curated with Thomas Haddad the digital exhibition Constellations: Reimagining Celestial Histories in the Early Americas. Nydia works at the intersection of the History of Science, History of the Book, and Visual Studies and her research broadly interrogates the gap between practice, theory and representation in images of space and time in early modernity. Her work is informed by the study of historical archives and libraries, as well as through practice-based research including engraving, filmmaking and digital humanities. Nydia is also the initiator and coordinator of the international and interdisciplinary documentary project “American Skies”, with members in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the U.S, and Italy. As a returning Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow in the UC-Huntington Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, she will fully revise her book manuscript Paper Moons: the Poetics of Selenography in the Seventeenth Century on the changing values of moon maps as visual experiments, technical instruments and commodities in the early phases of the development of the telescope. She will also develop her second book project that engages with celestial environmental perceptions and representations in the early Californias.

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