2016-17 Long-Term Fellows

R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities
Jon Mee, Professor, University of York

Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. He was educated at the universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Cambridge before taking up a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College Oxford. He then went on to be Senior Lecturer and the Australian National University from 1991 to 1996 before returning to the UK to take up a post as university lecturer in the English Faculty of Oxford, later Professor of Romanticism, and Margaret Candfield Fellow in English at University College, Oxford, from 1996 to 2007. Before moving to York, he was Professor of English at the University of Warwick from 2007 to 2013. He has published widely on the literature, culture and politics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His most recent book is Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty from Cambridge University Press 2016. Among other things, he plans to spend his time at The Huntington working towards a new book under the title Networks of Improvement: Literature, Knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution, 1781 to 1830.  More about Jon Mee

Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow in British History
Margo Todd, Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Margo Todd is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of British History at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in early modern English and Scottish history. Her earlier work has been mostly on religious history, with a focus on the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition, and she will return to this interest later; however, her current projects are on urban and legal history. Her books include Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order, Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (winner of the Longman-History Today Prize and the Scottish History Book of the Year Award), and most recently an edition of The Perth Kirk Session Book, 1577-1590. Her most recent article is a foray into legal history on mediation and arbitration. She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others; has been a visiting fellow in St. Andrews, Edinburgh, and Cambridge; and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. More about Margo Todd

Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow in the History and Culture of the Americas
Woody Holton, Professor, University of South Carolina

Woody Holton is Bonnie and Peter McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. His 2009 book, Abigail Adams, which he wrote on a Guggenheim fellowship, won the Bancroft Prize. Holton is also the author of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His first book, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999), won the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award (presented by the New York Sons of the Revolution) and the Merle Curti Award (presented by the Organization of American Historians). His books are required reading on more than 200 college campuses, and his work has been widely anthologized and also translated into German and Arabic. He is currently writing a comprehensive history of the American Revolutionary era under the working title Liberty is Sweet. The recent recipient of a Humanities grant from USC’s Provost, Holton in 2016-17 will be a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Professor at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California. More about Woody Holton

Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow in Early American History
John Demos, Professor Emeritus, Yale University

John Demos was educated at Harvard College (B.A. magna cum laude, 1959), Oxford University, the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., 1961), and Harvard University (graduate work, 1963-68). He served two years (1961-63) in the U.S. Peace Corps, as a schoolteacher in Ghana. In 1968 he was appointed as Assistant Professor of History, Brandeis University; he remained at Brandeis, while rising to the rank of Professor and Chair of the History Dept., until 1986. At that point he was appointed as Professor of History at Yale; subsequently he became the Samuel Knight Professor of History, a position he held until his retirement in 2008. Since then he has continued to teach at Yale, on an occasional basis. His courses and seminars have focused mainly on American social history (topic) and the colonial era (period); he has also taught, in a regular way, about the craft of historical writing. He is the author of eight books, one of which (Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England) won the Bancroft Prize in American History, another (The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America) the Francis Parkman Prize and the Ray Allen Billington Prize (plus becoming a finalist for the National Book Award in General Non-Fiction). His most recent book is The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (also a finalist for the National Book Award). More about John Demos

Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History
Steven Hahn, Professor, New York University

Steven Hahn received his Ph.D. at Yale University and is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (Oxford University Press, 1983), which received both the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians. He is also the coeditor of The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (University of North Carolina Press, 1985); and of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Series III: Land and Labor in 1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). In 2004, Hahn’s book, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press), received the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the Merle Curti Prize in Social History of the Organization of American Historians. This fall, Viking Press will publish his latest book, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in An Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910. This coming academic year at The Huntington Library, he will be completing another book, Colonies, Nations, Empires: A History of the United States and the People Who Made It (to be published by Bedford/St. Martin’s Press).

Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science & Technology
Tawrin Baker, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pittsburgh

Tawrin Baker received his PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2014. From 2015-16 he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and has received fellowships from the Newberry Library and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His book-in-progress is titled Chiasmata: Vision and the Intertwined Histories of Anatomy, Natural Philosophy, and Optics in the Early Modern Period.  More about Tawrin Baker

Dana and David Dornsife Fellow
Keith Woodhouse, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University

Keith Woodhouse is an assistant professor at Northwestern University, where he teaches in the History Department and the Environmental Policy and Culture Program. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010 and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California and Huntington Library Institute on California and the West. He is finishing a history of radical environmentalism in the late-twentieth-century United States tentatively titled A Subversive Nature. More about Keith Woodhouse

Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow
Nicholas Ridout, Professor, Queen Mary University of London

Nicholas Ridout is Professor of Theatre at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love (Michigan 2013), Theatre & Ethics (Palgrave 2009), and Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge 2006). He co-edited, with Joe Kelleher, Contemporary Theatres in Europe (Routledge 2006) and was the author, with Joe Kelleher and members of the company, of The Theatre of Sociètas Raffaello Sanzio (Routledge 2009). During his fellowship at The Huntington he will be working on a new project about theatre, consumption and the colonial relation, entitled Scenes from Bourgeois Life.  More about Nicholas Ridout

Mellon Fellow
Tiffany Werth, Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University

Tiffany Jo Werth (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Her work on the contentious relationship of romance to the long English Reformation has appeared in article form in the Shakespearean International Yearbook and English Literary Renaissance and as The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her current book project, entitled The English Lithic Imagination from More to Milton challenges an entrenched scholarly narrative that equates the Renaissance with human preeminence by tracing the reciprocal relationships of the human and the stony. This project reflects her broader research into Renaissance ecologies of the nonhuman, theories of taxonomy, and ecocriticism. She’s a founding member of Oecologies: Inhabiting Premodern Worlds, a collaborative research cluster that gathers scholars from the humanities living and working along the North American Pacific Coast to ask how conceptual or metaphorical resources might reorient our perceptions about the premodern past as well as our present and future moments. Publications that reflect these interests include essays in the edited collection The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, Literature Compass Online, Upstart a Journal of English Renaissance Studies, and a volume of Spenser Studies on “Spenser and the Human.” In addition, she recently guest edited a special issue on “Shakespeare and the Human” for The Shakespearean International Yearbook. She currently serves as vice-president for the International Spenser Society and is a visiting scholar at the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. More about Tiffany Werth

Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences
Heidi Hausse, Mellon Research Fellow, Columbia Society of Fellows

Heidi Hausse is a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University.  She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 2016. Her research uses the hands-on practices of surgeons and artisans to explore life in early modern Europe, with a particular interest in the intersections of culture, medicine, and technology. Her book project, Cutting, Coping, Curing: Surgical Dismemberment in the Holy Roman Empire, 1500-1700, examines surgical treatises and artifacts of prostheses to uncover a transformation in the way in which early moderns cut apart the body (through amputation) and worked to artificially put it back together (with mechanical limbs). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (in Philadelphia), and the Dr. Günther Findel-Stiftung. She has articles published or forthcoming in The Journal of Early Modern Historyand The Sixteenth Century Journal.  More about Heidi Hausse

NEH Fellow
J.K. Barret, Associate Professor, University of Texas, Austin

J.K. Barret is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. In it, Barret investigates Renaissance literary constructions of the future, the complex relations between futurity and narrative, and the emergence of novel accounts of Englishness that turn on looking to the future rather than the past in the works of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton. As an NEH Fellow at the Huntington Library for 2016-17, she will be working on her second book project, Pandora’s Clock: Contingent Ethics in Renaissance English Literature. She argues that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers viewed the culture’s widespread temporal contestation and imprecision as a tantalizing resource, and traces how their fictions develop an ethics predicated on time’s potentiality. In addition to time and the future, her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, drama, literature and the visual arts, early modern legal theory, antiquity in the Renaissance, pastoral, romance, translation studies and narrative theory.  More about J.K. Barret

NEH Fellow
Laura Forsberg, Adjunct Professor, Concordia University Texas

Laura Forsberg recently received her Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and teaches at Concordia University Texas. Her research examines the intersection of literature, material culture, and science in the Victorian period. Her articles have been published in Victorian Studies, SEL: Studies in English Literature and Papers of the Bibliographical Society. While at The Huntington, she will be completing her book manuscript on The Miniature and Victorian Literature, which describes the Victorian experience of miniature objects across art, science, childhood studies and the history of the book. More about Laura Forsberg

NEH Fellow
Matthew Hunter, Assistant Professor, McGill University

Matthew C. Hunter (Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University) researches art and architecture of the long eighteenth century with special attention to their interactions with science and technology. His publications include Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013), The Clever Object (Wiley, 2013), co-edited with Francesco Lucchini, and Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science (Springer, 2010), with Roman Frigg. He is an editor of Grey Room. More about Matthew Hunter

Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellow
M. Scott Heerman, Assistant Professor, University of Miami

Scott Heerman earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2013 and he is an assistant professor of history at the University of Miami. Before joining the faculty in 2015, he was the Patrick Henry Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Heerman is currently completing his first book, entitled Many Slaveries: An Entangled History of Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country. It traces long and violent processes of enslavement and emancipation in the Illinois Country that spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He argues that slavery in French, Spanish, and Native North America shaped the legal processes of emancipation in the nineteenth century United States. Historians have long written about slavery’s expansion from the eastern seaboard into the heart of North America. Many Slaveries turns that analysis inside out. It establishes slavery’s deep roots in the Upper Mississippi Valley and traces its connections out to shape the contours of slavery and freedom in U.S. history. The book manuscript is under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press in its America in the Nineteenth Century Series. More about Scott Heerman

Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellow
Maria Barbara Zepeda Cortés, Assistant Professor, Lehigh University

María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés is a historian of Latin America and the Spanish Empire. In 2013, she joined the Department of History at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has a PhD in History from the University of California, San Diego and a BA in International Relations from El Colegio de México (Mexico). She is the author of Cambios y adaptaciones del nacionalismo puertorriqueño: del Grito de Lares al Estado Libre Asociado (UMNSH, 2015) which reconstructs the history of nationalist movements in Puerto Rico from 1868 to 1952. Zepeda Cortés is currently working on an ambitious second book manuscript, The Politics of Reform: José de Gálvez and the Transformation of the Spanish Empire, that examines eighteenth-century political culture and, in particular, the Spanish Bourbon Reforms during the reign of Charles III (1759-1788). This research project has received several prestigious research fellowships and awards at the university and national levels. More about Maria Barbara Zepeda Cortés

Fellow in the Huntington-UC Riverside Program for the Advancement of the Humanities
Fuson Wang, Assistant Professor, UC Riverside

Fuson Wang received a PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has a mixed disciplinary background in mathematics and literature, and consequently approaches literary studies with a consciously interdisciplinary perspective. His work seeks to make the humanities matter to science, and vice-versa. It engages a broad audience that includes medical humanists, medical anthropologists, disability theorists, historians of science and medicine, and literary critics. Currently, he is hard at work on a book manuscript about the British Romantic era and the medico-literary origins of smallpox inoculation. More about Fuson Wang

Caltech-Huntington Humanities Collaborations Fellowships
Bettina Koch, Associate Professor, Virginia Tech

Bettina Koch is Associate Professor of Political Science/ASPECT at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Her research focuses on Western and non-Western political theory, including Islamic, Latin American, and Indian political and cultural thought, the history of political ideas, comparative political theory more generally, issues related to the interaction of politics and religion, political violence in trans-cultural comparison, the concept of terrorism as a topic in political theory, state decline and state failure, mass surveillance related topics, and state terrorism. She has published widely on premodern and modern/contemporary political thought, both within the Western and the Islamic traditions. Her most recent publications include Patterns Legitimizing Political Violence in Transcultural Perspectives: Islamic and Christian Traditions and Legacies (De Gruyter 2015) and the edited volume State Terror, State Violence—Global Perspectives (Springer 2016). For a complete list of publications, visit here.  More about Bettina Koch

Caltech-Huntington Humanities Collaborations Fellowships
Leah Klement, Lecturer, Princeton University Writing Program

Leah Klement’s research focuses on the reception of classical antiquity in medieval English and Irish literature, with special interests in medieval discourses of ethnicity, citizenship, and sovereignty. Her current project traces a preoccupation with the concept of social “divisioun” in fourteenth-century English literature, examining how writers brought English legendary history together with classical literature on civil war to address the ethics of civil strife in contemporary England. At The Huntington, she will be researching the representation of civil conflict in English legal and historical materials. More about Leah Klement

Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor in the History of Science at Caltech and The Huntington
Stefano Gattei, Research Fellow, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Stefano Gattei graduated at the University of Milan in 2003 and was awarded a PhD in philosophy of science at the University of Bristol in 2004. He has been working extensively on contemporary issues and authors in the philosophy of science (especially Karl Popper and critical rationalism, Thomas Kuhn, the dynamics of theory-change and conceptual-change, the incommensurability thesis and relativism) as well as on the history of early modern astronomy and cosmology (with special focus on Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei). He has been teaching in various Italian universities (Milan, Vercelli, Pisa, Lucca and Padua), and has held research fellowships at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, in Philadelphia. His most recent publications include “On Tycho’s Shoulders, with Vesalius’ Eyes: Speaking Images in the Engraved Frontispiece of Kepler’s Tabulae Rudolphinae”, in A. Albrecht, G. Cordibella, V. G. Remmert (eds.), Tintenfass und Teleskop: Galileo Galilei im Schnittpunkt wissenschaftlicher, literarischer und visueller Kulturen im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin-Boston: Watre De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 337-368); Paul K. Feyerabend, Physics and Philosophy: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4, edited by Stefano Gattei and Joseph Agassi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and “Science, Criticism and the Search for Truth: Philosophical Footonotes to Kuhn’s Historiography”, in A. Blum, K. Gavroglu, C. Joas and J. Renn (eds.), Shifting Paradigms: Thomas S. Kuhn and the History of Science (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2016, pp. 123-138). His volume Early Biographies of Galileo is forthcoming with Princeton University Press; and he is currently working on a book on the role of engraved frontispieces and title pages in early modern astronomical works (under contract with Oxford University Press).

Occidental/Billington Visiting Professor in U.S. History
Bethel Saler, Associate Professor, Haverford College

Bethel Saler is an Associate Professor of History at Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania.  She holds an A.B. from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in U.S. History and U.S. Women’s History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She is the author of The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (The University of Pennsylvania, 2015), which examines the inseparable cultural and political project of early American state formation.  The Settlers’ Empire won the Western History Association’s W. Turrentine Jackson Award in 2015 for the best first book on the American West.  Her current book project, The Fantastic Republic: North Africa and the American Imagination, 1783-1825, explores U.S. fictional and factual encounters with the North African states and takes up questions of cosmopolitanism, the history of imagination and the binaries of East/West and Old/New Worlds. This project combines the fields of Diplomatic, Atlantic and Literary History. More about Bethel Saler