2017-18 Long-Term Fellows

R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities
Martha Howell, Professor, Columbia University

Martha Howell is the Miriam Champion Professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in social, economic, legal, and women’s history during the late medieval and early modern centuries, concentrating on the Burgundian Netherlands, northern France, and Germany. She received her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and both her M.A. and PhD. from Columbia. She was a member of the history faculty at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey from 1979 to 1989, when she joined the Columbia faculty. From 1989 to 1995 she served as Director of Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Her publications include Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge, 2010); From Reliable Sources, with Walter Prevenier (Cornell, 2001; German ed., Böhlau, 2004); Uit goede bron, with Marc Boone and Walter Prevenier (Garant, 2000); The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550 (Chicago, 1998); and Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986). She is presently working on the culture of credit in northern Europe during the late medieval and early modern centuries, examining how credit relationships were formed and sealed and how the meaning of both credit and creditors changed in the early modern period. Recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Fulbright, ACLS, Guggenheim, several European foundations among others, she was awarded a doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa, from the University of Ghent, Belgium in 2007 and in 2015 was elected a foreign member of the Royal Flemish Society of Belgium Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow in British History
Markku Peltonen, Professor, University of Helsinki

Markku Peltonen is Academy Professor at the Academy of Finland and Professor of History at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in early modern intellectual history. His publications include Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570-1640 (CUP, 1995), Cambridge Companion to Bacon (CUP, 1996), The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (CUP, 2003) and Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England (CUP, 2013). While at The Huntington, he will be completing his current book project, Republicanism, Democracy and Political Accountability in Revolutionary England. The project will provide a major reinterpretation of political thought in England during the revolutionary decades of the 1640s and 1650s. It argues that republicanism and its role in the political thought of the period has been misunderstood and that historians have ignored the importance of democracy in the same period. The project will also bring into focus for the first time the debate about political accountability – how political power and magistrates could be controlled.

Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow in the History and Culture of the Americas
Mark Valeri, Professor, Washington University in St. Louis

Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Valeri’s areas of specialization include religion and social thought, especially economics, in America; Reformation theology and the political history of Calvinism; Puritanism; and enlightenment moral philosophy. Valeri came to Washington University from Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, where he served as the Ernest Trice Thompson Professor of Church History since 1996. His prior appointment was in the Religious Studies department at Lewis and Clark College. His most recent book, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, (Princeton University Press, 2010), analyzes social transformations in the American economy from the early 1600s, when Puritans argued that personal profit should be subordinate to the common welfare, to the 1740s, when Christians increasingly celebrated commerce as an unqualified good. Valeri has received several fellowships, including an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies grant, and a Lilly Endowment faculty fellowship. Valeri earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University, his M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Whitworth College. He is currently working on religious conversion, belief, and political liberty in the eighteenth century.

Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow in Early American History
Daniel Richter, Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Daniel K. Richter is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Penn faculty, he taught at Dickinson College and the University of East Anglia. His most recent book is Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is also author of Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Harvard University Press, 2011), which was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best non-fiction books of 2011; Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and won the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century History; and The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), which received both the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians. At The Huntington, he will be writing a book tentatively titled The Lords Proprietors: Land and Power in Seventeenth-Century America, under contract with Harvard University Press. He began research for this project when he was last in residence in San Marino, during 2010–2011.

Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History
Richard White, Professor, Stanford University

Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford. Among his honors are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, 2006-2010. His most recent book is The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1898, which is part of The Oxford History of the United States. Publication date, Fall 2017. At The Huntington he will be working on California Time, a collaboration with his son, Jesse White, who is a photographer.

Dibner Distinguished Fellow in the History of Science & Technology
Janet Browne, Professor, Harvard University

Janet Browne is Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her interests range widely over the life and earth sciences, including evolutionary biology, natural history collecting, expeditions, museums, botanic gardens, and the field sciences in general. She is most widely known for her scholarly work on Charles Darwin that includes a two-volume biography that integrated Darwin’s science with his life and times. She has been at Harvard since 2006. Previously she taught at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London and was an associate editor of the early volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin in Cambridge UK. She is the current President of the History of Science Society. At The Huntington she is writing a (very) short history of biology for the general reader.

Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science & Technology
Stefano Gattei, Independent Scholar

Stefano Gattei graduated in Milan in 2003, and was awarded a PhD at the University of Bristol, in 2004. He has worked and published extensively in the philosophy of science. Recently, his research has focused on the history of early modern astronomy and cosmology. He is particularly interested in the argumentative structure of early modern scientific works, with specific attention to engraved frontispieces and title pages, at a time in which images were often used to ‘say’ what was not possible to openly state in print. He taught at various universities in Italy, and held research fellowships at Columbia University (2009), Harvard University (2012) and the University of Pennsylvania (2014-2016). In 2016-2017 he was Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor of History of Science and Technology at Caltech. Besides a number of articles and book sections, he is the author of Thomas Kuhn’s ‘Linguistic Turn’ and the Legacy of Logical Positivism (Ashgate, 2008) and Karl Popper’s Philosophy of Science: Rationality Without Foundations (Routledge, 2009); he is the co-editor of the fourth volume of Paul Feyerabend’s philosophical papers (Physics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2016), and of Encouraging Openness (Springer, 2017). His Early Biographies of Galileo is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. At The Huntington, he will be working on a book provisionally titled A ‘School of Athens’ for Astronomy: The Engraved Frontispiece of Johannes Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables (1627), under contract with Oxford University Press.

Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science & Technology
Renée Raphael, Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine

Renée Raphael is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining she was a Hanna Kiel Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2009. Her first book, Reading Galileo: Scribal Technologies and the Two New Sciences (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), examines the reception of Galileo’s final publication through surviving annotations and teaching notes. Her current project is a study of the circulation of early modern mining practitioners and technologies within Europe and the Americas.

Dana and David Dornsife Fellow
Mary Mendoza, Assistant Professor, University of Vermont

Mary E. Mendoza is an Assistant Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. Her work focuses on the intersections between environmental and borderlands history and she teaches courses on modern U.S. history, race in the American West, environmental history, Chicano history, and borderlands history. Mendoza’s current book project, Unnatural Border: Race and Environment at the U.S.-Mexico Divide, explores the intersections between the natural and built environments along the U.S.-Mexico border. Specifically, she writes about the history of fence construction along the border, the ways that nature has shaped and been shaped by construction, and how fences, though practically powerless to stop the movement of dynamic nature, have become a symbol of a racialized landscape of power, control, and exclusion. Mendoza has also written about migration, public health, race and racism, ableism, and U.S.-Mexico relations and is co-editing an anthology on race and environment tentatively titled, Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History. She has received grants and fellowships from National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow
James Sidbury, Professor, Rice University

James Sidbury received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University (1991), taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1991 to 2011, and is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History at Rice University. He is the author of Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810 (1997) and Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (2007) and the co-editor (with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Matt D. Childs) of The Urban Black Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (2013). He has published on the history of race, slavery, and the enslaved in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth-century century Anglo-Atlantic world, and on human trafficking and slavery in world today. At The Huntington he will work on a book that traces the ways that Africans, Americans and Europeans, all of whom entered the era of the Columbian Exchange with profoundly local “ethnic” senses of collective identity, moved toward racial identities in the United States by the era of the Early Republic.

Mellon Fellow
Catherine Bates, Professor, University of Warwick

Catherine Bates is Research Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She was Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, Cambridge before moving to Warwick as a Research Fellow in 1995. She was appointed Senior Lecturer in 2001, Reader in 2004, and Professor in 2009. She served as Head of Department from 2009 to 2014. She works on sixteenth-century literature and culture, with a special emphasis on courtly forms such as lyric and epic. She has published five monographs, including The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (1992), Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (2007), Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (2013); and On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (2017). She has also edited the Cambridge Companion to the Epic (2010) and the Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry (2017), and with Patrick Cheney is currently co-editor of Sixteenth-Century British Poetry, volume 4 of the Oxford History of Poetry in English. She held a Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2014/15, and was awarded the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2015.

Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences
Leah Astbury, Fellow, University of Cambridge

Leah Astbury received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2016. In 2016/17 she was a Society for Renaissance Studies Postdoctoral Fellow and Women in Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. Her research examines domestic medicine in early modern England. While at The Huntington, she will be completing her book manuscript, Breeding Women and Lusty Infants in Early Modern England, which draws on medical treatises, family correspondence and life-writing to uncover the experience of pregnancy, birth and after-birth care. In October 2018 she will return to the University of Cambridge to take up a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship.

NEH Fellow
Andrew Lipman, Assistant Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University

Andrew Lipman is Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research interests include early America, Native Americans, seafaring, technology, and violence. His first book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale, 2015), was a winner of the 2016 Bancroft Prize. As a 2017-2018 NEH Fellow, he will be working on his next project, Squanto’s Odyssey. The book will explore the life and legend of the Wampanoag man who was kidnapped by a rogue fisherman in 1614, and made his way through several Atlantic ports on his long journey home. He later became a key ally of the Plymouth colonists, and centuries later became a mythic figure in American memory.

NEH Fellow
Catherine Roach, Associate Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University

Catherine Roach holds a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. Her research investigates how people lived with, exhibited, and interpreted art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on British painting and urban exhibition culture. She treats the history of exhibitions as a visual endeavor. To that end, she has argued that period images of display should be treated as rich constructs, rather than transparent records, and she has created reconstructions of lost installations that highlight uncertainty and juxtaposition. In 2010, she curated Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Her most recent publications include Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, an Ashgate book published by Routledge in 2016, and “Rehanging Reynolds at the British Institution: Methods for Reconstructing Ephemeral Displays,” published in British Art Studies. She is currently at work on her second book, a history of the groundbreaking nineteenth-century exhibition society, the British Institution.

Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellow
Allison Bigelow, Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

Allison Bigelow is assistant professor of colonial Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia and Faculty Coordinator of UVa’s Maya K’iche’ program, part of the Duke-UVa-Vanderbilt distance-learning initiative for Less Commonly Taught Languages. From 2012-2014, she was an NEH postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (William & Mary). With support from the ACLS and Huntington Libraries, Allison is finishing her book project, Cultural Touchstones: Mining, Refining, and the Languages of Empire in the Early Americas (committed to the OIEAHC/UNC Press). This study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reports on gold, silver, copper, and iron analyzes how indigenous and European empires respond to the same raw materials of scientific inquiry in different ways and how they organize their perceptions of the world through particular linguistic expressions.

Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellow
Daniel Maze, Independent Scholar

Daniel Wallace Maze grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and majored in Philosophy at Williams College in Massachusetts. He attended the American Film Institute Conservatory for directing and became a writer and director of independent films. He completed his Masters and Ph.D. in the History of Renaissance Art at UCLA in 2013. That year his article “Giovanni Bellini: Birth, Parentage, and Independence” in Renaissance Quarterly was runner-up for the Harvard University/Villa I Tatti Prize for Best Published Essay by a Junior Scholar. He held the Samuel H. Kress Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in the History of Art at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence from 2011 to 2013 and was a Fulbright Scholar in the History of Art at the University of York from 2016-17. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Delmas Foundation. His current book project, The Bellini Workshop, is a comprehensive history of the Bellini family of artists of Renaissance Venice.

Fellow in the Huntington-UC Riverside Program for the Advancement of the Humanities
Alejandra Dubcovsky, Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside

Alejandra Dubcovsky is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is an inaugural fellow for The Huntington Library-UCR Program for the Advancement of the Humanities. Her first book, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (2016), won the 2016 Michael V. R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. Her work has also been featured in several journals, including Ethnohistory, The William and Mary Quarterly, Native South, and Early American Studies.

Caltech-Huntington Humanities Collaborations Fellowships
Rory Cox, Lecturer, University of St. Andrews

Rory Cox is Lecturer in Late Mediaeval History at the University of St Andrews. Rory is particularly interested in the relationship between ethics, law, and warfare across time and in different cultures. He received his BA and MA from University College London, and his D.Phil from the University of Oxford. He has taught at Aberystwyth University and held fellowships at the Institute for Historical Research, London, and the Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, University of Stockholm. Rory is an Associate Director of the St. Andrews Institute of Intellectual History, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Co-Editor of the new journal Global Intellectual History (Routledge/Taylor & Francis). Rory’s first monograph, John Wyclif on War and Peace (Royal Historical Society, 2014), argues that the fourteenth-century English scholastic, John Wyclif, rejected medieval just war doctrine and was Europe’s first absolute pacifist. He is currently working on an ambitious new book project, War and Justice: from Antiquity to the End of the Middle Ages, which will be published by Princeton University Press. This broad comparative history examines how ancient and medieval societies in the Near East and the West (c. 3000 BC - 1600 AD) tackled the problem of justifying warfare.

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

Leah Klement’s research focuses on intersections between literature and political identity in medieval English and Irish literature, with a special interest in classical influences on medieval concepts of citizenship, sovereignty, and the state. She is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled Exile’s Kingdom: Dislocation, Division, and the Making of Medieval Englishness, which 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 social unrest in contemporary England. At The Huntington, she will be researching the representation of civil conflict in English legal and historical materials.

Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor in the History of Science at Caltech and The Huntington
Amanda Vickery, Professor, Queen Mary University of London

Amanda Vickery graduated from the former Bedford College, London (now part of Royal Holloway, University of London), where she completed her PhD in Modern History. Vickery is professor of early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London, and has held academic posts at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of York. Her academic interests encompass the Late Modern period from the seventeenth century to the present with a strong emphasis on the Georgian period in England. She has written widely on social history, literature, the history of romance and the home, politics, law and crime with an emphasis on women’s studies and feminism. In 1998 she published her first book The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England, for which she received the Whitfield prize, the Wolfton History prize and the Longman-History Today prize. In 2006 she co-edited Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830, and in 2009, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England was published.

ACLS/Burkhardt Fellow
Shih-shan Susan Huang, Associate Professor, Rice University

Shih-Shan Susan Huang is an associate professor of art history at Rice University. Her project, First Impressions: Chinese Religious Woodcuts and Cultural Transformation, studies the imagery of Buddhist and Daoist woodcuts produced in the first “Golden Age” of Chinese printmaking, from 850 to 1450. It will be the first English-language treatment of religious woodcuts by an art historian. The study takes a cross-cultural perspective, drawing on religious woodcuts from the Song, Yuan, and Ming China, and from the northern kingdoms ruled by non-Chinese people—the Liao, the Tangut Xi Xia, and the Jin—and compares them to pertinent Korean, Japanese, and Islamic images. It sets a new interdisciplinary model of inquiry in humanities studies by responding critically to the current discourses on material and visual culture, the history of the book and print culture, and global history.

ACLS/Burkhardt Fellow
Mark Quigley, Associate Professor, University of Oregon

Mark Quigley is an associate professor of English at the University of Oregon specializing in modern Irish literature and cinema. He is the author of Empire’s Wake: Postcolonial Irish Writing and the Politics of Modern Literary Form (Fordham, 2013) and a variety of essays on Irish modernism, the history of Irish literary periodicals, and the racial politics of Irishness in US popular culture. He is the guest editor of a special issue of Modernist Cultures focusing on Ireland and the First World War that will be appearing in early 2018. Mark will be spending the year at The Huntington as an ACLS Burkhardt fellow researching and writing his new book, Not Such A Long Way to Tipperary, the first study of the richly complex counter-culture that emerged in Ireland to oppose Irish involvement in the First World War. He previously was in residence at The Huntington as a Mayers fellow.

ACLS/Burkhardt Fellow
Tamara Venit-Shelton, Associate Professor, Claremont McKenna College

Tamara Venit-Shelton is an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College. She has a B.A. from Amherst College and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her research interests lie in the American West and social, environmental, and political movements in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Prior to CMC, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow and an assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Reed College. Her first book, A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850-1900, was published as part of the Western History Series, a joint-venture between the University of California Press and The Huntington Library. She has also edited a series of American history textbooks for Gale/Cengage Learning and published articles on teaching history and empathy. In addition to her writing, she has consulted on historical movies set in the American West and recently appeared on the Travel Channel’s Expedition Unknown, speaking about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the construction of the United States’ first transcontinental railroad. Currently, she working on a book about the long history of Chinese medicine in the United States.

Marie Curie Fellow (European Commission)
David O’Shaughnessy, Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin

David O’Shaughnessy is Assistant Professor in eighteenth-century studies at Trinity College Dublin. He completed a DPhil in English Language & Literature at the University of Oxford in 2007 where he was subsequently elected to a Junior Research Fellowship. After Oxford, he spent two years as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick before coming to Trinity in 2012. His doctoral and postdoctoral work on William Godwin appeared in William Godwin and the Theatre (2010), The Plays of William Godwin (2010), and, with Mark Philp and Vicky Myers, The Diary of William Godwin (2010). He was awarded a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant in 2013 to work on theatre censorship in Britain, 1737-1843. His essays have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Life, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and History of European Ideas. The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, co-edited with Michael Griffin, is forthcoming. He will spend the forthcoming year at The Huntington working on a book on the eighteenth-century history play as a Marie Curie Global Fellow.

NEH Fellow in Residence
Michele Navakas, Assistant Professor, Miami University

Michele Currie Navakas (Ph.D. UC-Irvine) is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. She is the author of Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania 2017), which analyzes the history of the incorporation of Florida in conjunction with the development of new ideas of personhood, possession, and political identity in American letters. Her scholarship on early American literature and the environment also appears in Early American Literature and Early American Studies. Her current book project, Coral in Early American Literature, Science, and Culture, is a cultural biography of coral in early America that emphasizes the intellectual genealogy of personhood. At The Huntington she is researching several sources of knowledge that shaped early American understandings and literary representations of coral, including classical myth, Western scientific debates about coral’s biology, African oral traditions, and cultural and religious uses of coral in the South Seas.