2019-20 Awarded Fellowships

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Distinguished Professor of English at Northeastern University and the founding Co-Director of the NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks which conducts research in the fields of digital humanities and computational social science. She teaches in the fields of early American and Atlantic world literary studies, as well as literature and social justice, theatre studies, gender studies, and digital humanities. She is the author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1659-1859 (Duke University Press in 2014) which received the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research from the American Society of Theatre Research and The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004) which won the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University. Together with Michael Drexler, she is co-editor of The Haitian Revolution and the Early U.S.: Histories, Geographies, and Textualities (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016). She is the Co-Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. She is one of the founders of the award-winning Our Marathon project, a crowd-sourced on-line archive of the Boston Marathon bombings and of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, an open access collection that engages with digital decolonization of the archive. She is currently working on two book projects, one on the Atlantic colonial origins of the novel, and a second titled Geographies of Reproduction: Sex, Gender, and Coloniality.

Dympna C. Callaghan is University Professor and William L. Safire Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English at Syracuse University. She has published widely on the writers of the English Renaissance and was President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2012-13. Callaghan has held fellowships at the Folger, Huntington and Newberry Libraries, and at the Getty Research Centre in Los Angeles, at Clare Hall and Hughes Hall at Cambridge University, and, at the Bogliasco Center for Arts and Humanities in Liguria, Italy. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and she was Lloyd David distinguished fellow at the University of Queensland Australia for 2015. Her most recent books are: Who Was William Shakespeare? (2013); Hamlet: Language and Writing (2015); The Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2nd edn. 2016); and Shakespeare in Our Time (2016), a volume prepared on behalf of the Shakespeare Association of America to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, which she co-edited with Suzanne Gossett. Callaghan is also the editor of the book series Arden Language and Writing, and co-editor, with Michael Dobson of the Palgrave Shakespeare monograph series.

James Walvin is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York, England. He has held fellowships and positions at The Australian National University, the University of the West Indies, Edinburgh, Yale and the College of William and Mary (where he was Kenan Distinguished Professor.) He has published widely on modern social history, more especially on the history of slavery and the slave trade. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2008 he was awarded an O.B.E. for services to scholarship.

Christopher Clark is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, where he has taught Early American History since 2005 and served as Head of the History Department from 2013 to 2018. He obtained his PhD from Harvard and taught at the University of York and then the University of Warwick before moving to Connecticut. He has held fellowships at Selwyn College Cambridge, St. Catherine’s College Oxford, the American Antiquarian Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. His books include The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860, which won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Award; The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association; Social Change in America from the Revolution through the Civil War; and (with Nancy Hewitt and others) two editions of the American Social History Project’s Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History.

Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (University Press of Virginia, 1999) and Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), as well as recent essays about Alexander Gardner’s photography at Gettysburg; the Battle of the Crater in fiction; Philip Sheridan’s memoirs; Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender to William T. Sherman; and Richard Taylor’s Destruction and Reconstruction. He has published six volumes of poems and two critical studies of American poetry, and he is the general editor of the 2012 edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Cushman has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Greece. In 2014 he was named Cavalier Distinguished Professor, and in 2015 he won a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. A frequent speaker at Huntington Library Civil War conferences, he looks forward to joining the 2019-2020 community of scholars in San Marino, where he will be focusing on the emerging market for Civil War memoirs at the end of the nineteenth century and the influence of those memoirs on public imagination.

Edmund Russell is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches environmental history and history of technology. Russell earned a B.A. in English at Stanford University and a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Michigan. Russell helped found two areas of research: the environmental history of war, and coevolutionary history (which studies the role of social forces in coevolution of human and non-human populations). His monographs include War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth, and Greyhound Nation: A Coevolutionary History of England, 1200-1900. He coedited Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (with Richard Tucker) and CQ Guide to U.S. Environmental Policy (with Sally Fairfax). Russell has received the Edelstein Prize (Society for the History of Technology), the Rachel Carson Prize (American Society for Environmental History), the Leopold-Hidy Prize (American Society for Environmental History and Forest History Society), the Forum for the History of Science in America Prize, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award, the Virginia Alumni Board of Trustees Teaching Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Russell is president of the American Society for Environmental History and a former vice president of the American Historical Association. At The Huntington Library, Russell will be working on the first scholarly book on the U.S. transcontinental telegraph, which was completed in 1861.

Jack Hartnell is Lecturer in Art History at the University of East Anglia where his research and teaching focus is on the visual culture of medieval and renaissance science. His most recent book, Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages, was published in 2018 with the Wellcome Collection, London. At The Huntington, Jack will be completing his next book which traces the vibrant history of the so-called ‘Wound Man’, a graphic diagram of injury and surgical cure that spread from fourteenth-century Europe to eighteenth-century Japan.

Antoine Lentacker is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UC Riverside. His work focuses on the intersections between the histories of science, medicine, and media in modern Europe. At the Huntington in 2019-20 he will be at work on a book project entitled Secret Remedies: Making Media and Medicines in Modern Europe, 1770-1930, a study of the genres and media in which knowledge about drugs used to be made and disseminated in the long nineteenth century. The project’s goal is to paint a broad picture of how drugs were known and trusted before the era of modern regulation, while also highlighting drugs’ unique ability to reveal changing attitudes toward the written word. Essays related to this project have appeared or are forthcoming in Social Studies of Science, The Journal of Modern History, and Representations.

Dawna Schuld is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History in the Department of Visualization, Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on the intersections between art, technology, and the sciences, with an emphasis on how the phenomena of perception are implemented as artistic media. She is the author of Minimal Conditions: Light, Space, and Subjectivity (The University of California Press, 2018), and co-editor, with Cristina Albu (University of Missouri, Kansas City), of Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2018).

Emily Berquist Soule is a historian of the Spanish Empire and Colonial Latin America. She is presently at work on a 500-year history of the slave trade in Spain and Spanish America, The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire (under contract with Yale University Press). The book explores how the slave trade stood at the foundation of the Spanish Empire, from Spain’s first overseas explorations to the Canary Islands in the early fifteenth century through the loss of its final American colonies in the late nineteenth century. It explores how Spain’s involvement in the slave trade was motivated by profit; built on a rhetoric of difference legitimated by religion; and sustained by policies of governance organized around race. It makes the case that slavery stood at the center of the emerging global economy of capitalism; lay at the foundation of the bodies of laws that organized human society; and was inseparable from the rhetoric of world geopolitical relations. Previous research funding for this project includes a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2015-2016), and an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant (2018). Related journal articles have appeared in Atlantic Studies and Slavery and Abolition. Berquist Soule’s first monograph, The Bishop’s Utopia: Imagining Improvement in Colonial Peru (Pennsylvania, 2014), was written with the support of a Fulbright Fellowship (2003-2004), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2011-2012), and a Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science at the Huntington Library (2003-2004), as well as multiple smaller grants. Berquist Soule completed her B.A. cum laude at Vassar College, and her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied under Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. She is Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach.

Sayuri Guthrie Shimizu is Dunlevie Family Professor of History at Rice University. She teaches and researches in the history of the United States’ relations with the wider world. She received her MA and Ph. D. in history from Cornell University. She is the author of several books, most recently, Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). At Huntington, she will work on her current book project A Sea Change: The Enclosure of the Pacific Commons.

Ben Davidson completed his PhD in United States history at New York University in 2018, and he held a James Smithson Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C during the 2018-2019 academic year. At The Huntington Library, he will work on completing research and revisions for his book manuscript, “Freedom’s Generation: Coming of Age in the Era of Emancipation.” This project traces the lives of the generation of black and white children, in the North, South, and West, who grew up during the Civil War era, exploring how young people across the nation learned persistent lessons, carried into adulthood, about complexities intrinsic to ideas and experiences of emancipation. In support of research for this project, Davidson has received long-term fellowships from the U.S. Department of Education and New York University, and short-term fellowships from institutions including the American Historical Association, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Virginia Historical Society. He has taught high school English, worked as a researcher for a children’s book publisher, and taught History 101 at NYU, among other courses.

Urmi Engineer Willoughby is Assistant Professor of History at Murray State University. She completed her doctorate at the University of California-Santa Cruz and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Colby College and the University of Pittsburgh’s World History Center. She approaches histories of disease and medicine from a global and ecological perspective. Her research focuses on disease and ecology in the Mississippi Valley, Gulf South, and Caribbean, and draws connections between the southern United States, the colonial Atlantic, and South Asia. Her first book, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, was published in Louisiana University Press’s series on “The Natural World of the Gulf South.” It was awarded the 2017 Williams prize for best book in Louisiana history. The book examines the environmental, social, and cultural history of yellow fever epidemics in New Orleans in a global framework. Her current project, titled Cultivating Malaria, is an environmental and cultural history of malaria in the Gulf Coast and Lower Mississippi Valley.

Verónica Castillo-Muñoz is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with training in Gender history, Latin America, and U.S. history. She has written widely on the intersections between gender, family migration, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Castillo-Muñoz is the author of the book, The Other California: Land Identity and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands, published by the University of California Press (2016). Her current book project, Women and Revolution: A Tale of Violence and Deception Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, uses intimacy as a lens to understand how gender operated during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), and how women negotiated war, violence, and family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border. She is also the Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos (UC Press). While at The Huntington, she will be working on a project entitled Women and Revolution: A Tale of Violence and Deception Across the U.S.- Mexico Borderlands.

Katie A. Moore is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to that she was Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University. Her research focuses on early North America and the history of capitalism, with a particular emphasis on the history of money. She has published articles in Pennsylvania History and Early American Studies and has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia. At The Huntington she will be completing work on her book entitled A Revolutionary Currency: Money, Sovereignty, and the Origins of American Independence.

Lauren R. Cannady is assistant director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute and lecturer in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art. She received her PhD from New York University, where she specialized in early modern European art, architecture, and the history of ideas. At the Huntington she will complete a book manuscript titled Green Thoughts: The Garden in Early Modern Europe, which examines the transmission of natural knowledge through pattern, garden design, and ornament in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe. She is also co-editor, with Jennifer Ferng, of the forthcoming Crafting Artisanal Praxis: Networks of Power in the Long Eighteenth Century. While at The Huntington, she will be working on a project entitled Green Thoughts: The Garden in Early Modern Europe.

Sarah Rodríguez is assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include U.S. imperialism, expansion, borderlands, labor, and comparative political history. Her current book manuscript, Children of the Great Mexican Family: Texas, Anglo-American Migration, and the Rise of the U.S. Empire, 1821-1867, reconsiders the causes and consequences of the United States’ dramatic rise to continental dominance at the middle of the nineteenth century. Originally from Pasadena, she attended Vassar College and the University of Pennsylvania where she received her PhD in 2015 before joining the history department at the University of Arkansas.

Justina Spencer is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from Oxford University. Her primary research interest concerns how early modern artists conceptualized and translated three-dimensional space onto the canvas or page, whether by means of linear perspective, optical instrumentation, or cartography. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Collections and Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture. At The Huntington Library, she is completing her first book, Peeping In, Peering Out: Monocularity and Early Modern Vision, which explores the role of monocular vision in the development of linear perspective and anamorphosis from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. This study probes the discrepancy between natural and pictorial perspective and argues that monocular art forms—such as Dutch perspective boxes—were collected and interpreted as intellectual exercises used to sharpen visual and rhetorical acumen.

Eva Mroczek received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2012 and is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. She works at the intersection of Jewish antiquity, the history of biblical interpretation, and Book History. Her first book, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford UP 2016), illustrates how early Jewish writers imagined their own sacred writing before the Bible existed as a book and a concept. It was awarded the 2017 De Long Prize in Book History from SHARP and was the finalist for the 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Prize from the Association for Jewish Studies. She is currently completing a guide to the many imaginary books mentioned in ancient and medieval Jewish literature. Her project at The Huntington library is Out of the Cave: The Possibility of a New Scriptural Past, a history of the very idea of textual discovery. The famous story about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls by a Bedouin shepherd in a desert cave is not isolated. Its contours are basically true, but it stands in a tradition that dates to antiquity, spanning the boundary between premodern religious mythmaking and modern scholarship. Identifying the discovery narrative as a durable genre of historical and theological discourse—both in and about Jewish and Christian texts—this project illustrates how such stories are sites where basic problems of the historical and religious imagination are worked out. It reveals that tales of textual loss and recovery lie at the heart of how ancient and modern people understand the survival of the past and its incursions into the present and asks what happens to tradition in light of belated discoveries of hidden knowledge—unknown scriptural pasts.

Alejandra Dubcovsky is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is also the inaugural fellow in the Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, a partnership of The Huntington and UC Riverside that aims to support the future of the humanities. She received her BA and PhD from UC Berkeley, and a Masters in Library and Information Science from San Jose State. Her first book, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (HUP 2016), won the 2016 Michael V. R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. Her works has been featured in Ethnohistory, Early America Studies, The Journal of Southern History, Native South, and the William and Mary Quarterly, among others. She has served in the editorial boards of the journals of Ethnohistory (2015-2018), NAISA (2017-2020), and Native South (2016-2021). In 2018, she was awarded a Mellon Advancing Intercultural Studies Grant and a UC Riverside-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Faculty Exchange Grant. Her new project, At the Frontlines of a Forgotten War, Gender, Violence, and Conflict in La Florida examines several fronts of Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713) through the lives and experiences of women. It interrogates the role of women and gender in violent conflict, and reconsiders who narrates stories of war, loss, and victory.

Fuson Wang is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He specializes in British Romantic literature and medical humanities. Having received undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and English literature, Fuson tends to approach literary studies with a consciously interdisciplinary orientation. His current book manuscript, The Smallpox Report: Vaccination and the Medico-Literary Genres of Romantic Disease, argues that smallpox's eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the Romantic-era literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. During his residence at The Huntington, he will begin work on a second book project on Romantic-era disability representation, tentatively titled Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Romantic Disability Theory at the Brink of Normal.

John Styles is Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, where he was previously Research Professor in History. Before taking up his research professorship at Hertfordshire, he was Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where he remains Senior Honorary Research Fellow. He specializes in the history of early modern Britain and its empire, especially the study of material life, manufacturing and design. His most recent books are Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (co-edited with Amanda Vickery, 2006), The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (2007), and Threads of Feeling: The London Foundling Hospital’s Textile Tokens, 1740-1770 (2010). His exhibition, ‘Threads of Feeling’, was displayed at the London Foundling Museum in 2010-11 and at the de Witt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA in 2013-14. From 2010 to 2015 he held a European Research Council Advanced Grant for his research project ‘Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel, 1400 to 1800’ (www.spinning-wheel.org). He is currently writing a book on fashion, textiles and the origins of Industrial Revolution.

Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology. He completed a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1998, with a dissertation on the development of aircraft landing aids. He currently works as the historian of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a unit of Caltech. Most of his work since has been at the intersection of science and technology in the later 20th century, and mostly related to aerospace. His most recent book was Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars, published in 2015, and he recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship with Naomi Oreskes. Prior to graduate school, he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy for four years, serving as a Damage Control Assistant and Acting Chief Engineer on a tank landing ship, and then as an operations officer for COMPHIBRON ONE in San Diego, CA.