Dr. Alyssa Collins is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in English in 2019 from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the intersections of blackness, technology, posthumanism, and digital culture. She is currently working on her first book, Cellular Blackness: Octavia E. Butler’s Posthuman Ontologies which uses literary and digital humanities methodologies to examine representations of human and cyborg embodiments in science fiction and contemporary digital media. While at The Huntington, she will track Butler’s engagement with microbiology, cancer, and posthumanism across her novels and research archive.
James Chandler is the William K. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and Founding Director of the Center for Disciplinary Innovation at the University of Chicago. From 2001-2018, he was Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, where he was Principal Investigator for a series of projects sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation addressing the transformation of humanities and social science disciplines. His publications include An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago, 2013), The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (ed. Cambridge UP, 2008), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene in British Romanticism, 1780-1840 (ed. with Kevin Gilmartin, 2005), and England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, (Chicago, 1998). Since 1990, he has been General Editor of Cambridge Studies in Romanticism for Cambridge University Press. His most recent book, , will be published next year by Wiley-Blackwell. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Wendy Wall is Avalon Professor of the Humanities and the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. A specialist in early modern English literature and culture, she teaches and researches topics such as gender studies, authorship, media studies (print, manuscript, and digital texts), food studies, women’s writing, global Shakespeare, theater, and poetry. She is co-creator and general editor (with Leah Knight) of the open access, collaborative critical edition, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. Wall is author of The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (1993); Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (2002); and Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (2015). In addition to serving as president and as a trustee for the Shakespeare Association of America, Professor Wall has chaired the Northwestern English Department, directed the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, and co-edited the journal, Renaissance Drama.
Raúl Coronado is an intellectual and literary historian and associate professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His first book, A World Not to Come: A History of Writing and Print Culture, received seven prizes including the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies and the Modern Language Association’s Best First Book Prize. The inaugural president of the Latina/o Studies Association, Coronado was recently awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2021. His current project is on the history of the Latinx self from the 1780s to the 1880s. It takes the history of reason and education, the language of political rights, the emergence of a print public sphere, and the language of interiority as the framework for thinking of the Latinx self. Contrary to dominant historical narratives of the self—with their origin in Cartesian subjectivity and the Protestant Reformation, the Latinx world held fast to spiritual and political concepts of community, seemingly rejecting individualism in favor of the communal. The book will expand how we think of interiority and the experience of fullness, not to reject individualism but to resituate the self in the communal.
David S. Shields is the Carolina Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina and the Chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. Trained at the College of William and Mary A.B., Trinity College University of Dublin and the University of Chicago (M.A., Ph.D.), he taught at Vassar College and The Citadel. His first monographs, Oracles of Empire and Civil Tongues and Polite Letters, were historicist surveys of the discourses and discursive institutions of British American conversation, manuscript communication, and print literature. He contributed extensively to A History of the Book in America and edited the journal Early American Literature from 1999 to 2003. He also served as president of the Society of Early Americanists from 1999-2001. His studies of American performing arts photography gave rise to the research website Broadway Photographs, the standard resource for information on the photographers who photographed the American Stage. His book Still: American Silent Motion Picture Photography won the Browne Award for “Best Single Work in American Cultural History” for 2013. Southern Provisions, on the rise, fall and restoration of southern food, earned the Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award of the Southern Foodways Alliance in 2016. The Culinarians, a collection of American chefs’ lives from 1793-1919, was a finalist for the 2018 James Beard Book Award for Food History.
ROGERS DISTINGUISHED FELLOW IN 19th-CENTURY AMERICAN HISTORY
Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History, Professor of African-American Studies and an affiliate faculty in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the prize-winning books: Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017) and To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997). She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has engaged in public history projects as a consultant for museum exhibitions and documentary films and worked with public school teachers. She has written pieces for the New York Times, Essence, The Root, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and others.
DIBNER DISTINGUISHED FELLOW IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Eileen Reeves is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, and her area of specialization is early modern science as it relates to literature and art of the period. Her publications include Painting the Heavens: Art and Astronomy in the Age of Galileo (1997), Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror (2008), (with Albert Van Helden) Galileo and Scheiner on Sunspots (2010), and Evening News: Optics, Astronomy and Journalism in Early Modern Europe (2014). Her project at The Huntington concerns, inevitably, Galileo, and its tentative title is “Galileo’s Faithful Shepherd.” Every single work he published, and a few that never made it into print, contains a reference to Il Pastor Fido, Giambattista Guarini’s glitzy, scandalous tragicomedy. While Galileo’s strategy initially appears a naked bid for attention, as nothing generated pan-European publicity from the late 1580s through the 1620s like that drama, she will investigate these authors’ shared fixation on more serious ideological, philosophical, and aesthetic questions.
Professor Ula Taylor is the 1960 Chair of Undergraduate Education and the H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Department Chair of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party and The Story Behind the Film, and co-editor of Black California Dreamin: The Crisis of California African American Communities. Her articles on African American Women’s History and feminist theory have appeared in the Journal of African American History, Journal of Women’s History, Feminist Studies, SOULS, and other academic journals and edited volumes. In 2013 she received the Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the University of California, Berkeley. Only 5% of the academic senate faculty receive this honor and she is the second African American woman in the history of the University to receive this award.
DIBNER RESEARCH FELLOW IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Karin Amundsen was the 2019-2021 NEH Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, William & Mary. She received her PhD from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on recovering the history of British mineral speculation in the early modern Atlantic World. At The Huntington, she will work on her book, Precious Perils: Alchemy, Mining, and English Colonization in the Americas, 1576-1624, which examines how theories of metallic generation, new mining technologies, and pursuit of the philosophers’ stone converged with political economy, religious reforms, and inter-imperial competition to stimulate the first phase of English colonization and played a key role in the development of plantations.
DIBNER RESEARCH FELLOW IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Lydia Barnett is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University and a specialist in the history of science, religion, gender, and the environment in early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. Her first book, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), argues for religion’s hidden role and complicated legacy in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness in early modern European science. During her time at The Huntington, she will be researching her second book project on labor and gender in the early modern earth and environmental sciences.
Benjamin Madley is Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history. He writes about Native Americans as well as colonialism in Africa, Australia, and Europe, often employing a transnational and comparative approach. He is the author of five book chapters while his nine articles have appeared in journals ranging from The American Historical Review and European History Quarterly to Pacific Historical Review. Yale University Press published his first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, in 2016. As a Dornsife Research Fellow at The Huntington, he will be writing a book about Native American miners in the California gold rush.
Priscilla Leiva is an Assistant Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Her research interests include relational ethnic studies, urban history and sports history, particularly as it relates to place making and community formation. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how stadiums have produced and sustained racial meanings that shape the city and belonging. She is also the co-founder of Chavez Ravine: An Unfinished Story, an oral history and archival collaboration that documents a long history of displacement and its aftermath in Los Angeles. Her public humanities work includes collaborations with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Boyle Heights Museum.
Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include early modern literature and culture, history and philosophy of science, environmental humanities, and literature and social justice. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a special issue of Philological Quarterly called “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms” (2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in several edited collections. While at The Huntington, she will be working on her book manuscript, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science, which traces how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution.
Kathleen Donegan is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds the Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. Distinguished Chair in Writing. She is the author of Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (UPenn, 2014), a book about the deeply unsettling history of early English colonial settlement in Native America. It investigates how an acute relationship between suffering and violence in those crisis-ridden outposts produced a discourse of catastrophe – a literature of chaos and misery through which American coloniality can be understood anew. Donegan’s current book project, which she will work on during her fellowship term, is The Spectral Plantation: The Other Worlds of Slavery. It seeks to tell the stories of the “other worlds” enslaved people participated in, once they were un-worlded by the conditions of perpetual bondage. It treats these other worlds as modes of departure within the plantation complex. The Spectral Plantation explores four pathways of departure –haunting, madness, obeah and music.
Elena Schneider is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching and research focus on Cuba and the Caribbean, colonialism, slavery, and the Black Atlantic. Her first book The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (2018) won multiple awards, including the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association. The book argued for the central role of people of African descent and rivalry over the slave trade in a crucial incident of imperial warfare, the British invasion, occupation, and return of Havana during the final stages of the Seven Years’ War. At the Huntington she will be researching her next book project on narratives of escape from slavery and maritime marronage in the Caribbean (or those who escaped slavery by sea).
MOLINA FELLOW IN THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE & ALLIED SCIENCES
Christopher D. E. Willoughby (PhD, Tulane University, 2016) is a historian of Atlantic slavery and U.S. Medicine. His research examines the history of racial science and medical education in the United States and Atlantic World, as well as having additional research interests in the history of capitalism, imperialism, and slavery. At The Huntington, he is beginning research on a new project entitled Collected Without Consent: How Capitalism, Imperialism, and Slavery Created Harvard Medical Schools’s Collection of Racial Skulls, which examines medical schools’ imbrication in the violence of the nineteenth-century global economy. He has been a fellow at The Pennsylvania State University, Emory University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Harvard University, and he has published in popular and academic venues such as Black Perspectives, The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, The Journal of Southern History, The New West Indian Guide, and The Washington Post. With Sean Morey Smith, he is the editor of the forthcoming volume Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery (Louisiana State University Press, Fall 2021) and is finishing a monograph entitled Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in American Medical Schools, which is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.
Ardeta Gjikola is a historian of early modern science whose research focuses on the relations between science and art, objectivity and subjectivity, and attitudes towards antiquities. At The Huntington, she will be working on a book project entitled “‘The Finest Things on Earth’: The Elgin Marbles and the Science of Taste,” which examines the formation and the circulation of aesthetic taste judgments by following the reception of the Parthenon sculptures in Britain in the early nineteenth century. She is a lecturer in history at Columbia University, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Columbia’s Society of Fellows.
Lisa Mendelman is an Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Menlo College. She specializes in the health humanities, with a focus on gender, race, and affect in twentieth-century America. Her first book, Modern Sentimentalism (Oxford UP, 2019), chronicles the emotional history of the modern woman and the corollary reinvention of sentimentalism in US interwar fiction. Her writing has also been published in such venues as American Literary History, Modernism/modernity, The Journal of Cultural Analytics, Arizona Quarterly, Public Books, and ASAP/J. Her work at The Huntington will further her new book project, Diagnosing Desire: Mental Health and Modern American Literature, 1890-1955.
Stevie Ruiz is an associate professor of environmental justice, critical race theory, and Chicana/o Studies at CSU Northridge. His current book manuscript, “Stewards of the Land: Race, Space, and Environmental Justice,” (under contract with University of North Carolina Press), is a study about the racial origins of the Environmental Justice Movement prior to the 1960s in the U.S. Southwest.
Joyce Pualani Warren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she teaches courses on Native Hawaiian, Pacific, and Ethnic American literatures. Her research interests include Pō, Mana Wahine, Indigeneity, Blackness, diaspora, and speculative fiction. At The Huntington, she will work on her current book manuscript, Theorizing Pō: Blackness and Bodies in Pacific Islands Literature, the first book-length study to recuperate the myriad forms of blackness and darkness that have been at the center of Indigenous Pacific political, cultural, and ontological formations for centuries. She is a past recipient of the University of Oregon’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Ethnic American Literatures and Cultural Productions and the Ford Foundation’s Dissertation Fellowship. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, American Quarterly, and Amerasia Journal.
Aminah Hasan-Birdwell is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor and Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. Previously she was the Associate Director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University and held the Alva and Beatrice Bradley Assistant Professorship of Philosophy at Furman University. Her research is primarily invested in the history of philosophy, history of political philosophy, receptions of early modern thought in twentieth-century philosophy, and philosophy of race and gender. Specifically, Dr. Hasan-Birdwell attends to marginalized figures in early modern philosophy and their contributions to philosophical issues of ontology, political thought, and ethics, as well as their relevance to combating the presence of racism and misogyny in the philosophical canon. She is currently working on a book that treats early modern women philosophers’ ethical and political responses to the Thirty Years’ War and English Civil War.
Elizabeth Bacon Eager earned her B.A. in architecture from Yale University, her M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University. Currently an assistant professor of art history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, Dr. Eager’s teaching encompasses the history of early American art and material culture, architectural history, print history, and the global nineteenth century. She specializes in the transatlantic history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and material culture, with a focus on intersections between art, science, and technology. At The Huntington, she is focused on the completion of her first book manuscript, titled The Technology of Drawing: Image and Industry in Early America. Examining the tools, techniques and materials of drawing practice in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this project charts the emergence of drawing (and its unique ways of both thinking and knowing) as an essential technology of modern industry.
ELEANOR SEARLE VISITING PROFESSOR IN HISTORY AT CALTECH AND THE HUNTINGTON
Alexander C.T. Geppert is Associate Professor of History and European Studies at New York University, jointly appointed by NYU Shanghai and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies with the Department of History in New York City. In 2019–2020 he held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. A historian of twentieth-century Europe, his work focuses on the nexus of spatiality, knowledge and transcendence in varying historical configurations, including outer space, miracles, and imperial expositions. Recent book publications include a trilogy on European astroculture, consisting of Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (2018), Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture after Apollo (2018), and Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia and the Cold War (2021). He also runs NYU Space Talks. As the Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor in History at Caltech and a fellow at The Huntington, Alexander Geppert will work on two related book projects, The Future in the Stars: Europe, Astroculture and the Age of Space, a cultural history of outer space in the European imagination, and Planetizing Earth: Outer Space and the Making of a Global Age, 1972–1990, a history of global astroculture, technoscience and planetization since the 1970s.
FELLOW IN THE ROGERS/RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AT CALTECH AND THE HUNTINGTON (RIHST@CH)
Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. He joined the Princeton History Department in 1975 after earning his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in history from the University of Chicago and spending a year at University College London. Professor Grafton has written intellectual biographies of a 15th-century Italian humanist, architect, and town planner, Leon Battista Alberti; a 16th-century Italian astrologer and medical man, Girolamo Cardano; and a 16th-century French classicist and historian, Joseph Scaliger. He also studies the long-term history of scholarly practices, such as forgery and the citation of sources, and has worked on many other topics in cultural and intellectual history. Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others. Two collections of essays, Defenders of the Text (1991) and Bring Out Your Dead (2001), cover most of the topics and themes that appeal to him. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003) and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical Association. Professor Grafton’s current project is a large-scale study of the science of chronology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe: how scholars attempted to assign dates to past events, reconstruct ancient calendars, and reconcile the Bible with competing accounts of the past.
FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION FELLOW IN THE HUNTINGTON-UC PROGRAM FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE HUMANITIES
Savannah Esquivel is an Assistant Professor in Art and Material Culture of Mexico and the Hispanic Americas (ca. 1500-1900) at the University of California Riverside and the Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow in The Huntington-UC Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, an innovative partnership designed to advance the humanities at public universities. Her research investigates how Mexico’s Indigenous communities engaged with Christian material culture after the Spanish invasion in 1519. While at The Huntington, Savannah will be working on her current book project, Unsettling the Spiritual Conquest: Indigenous Art and Agency in Mexico’s Colonial Monasteries, which explores how Nahua communities in Mexico’s agricultural heartland used Christian art and architecture to assert sovereignty, contend with extreme ecological change, and contest colonial violence.
FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION FELLOW IN THE HUNTINGTON-UC PROGRAM FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE HUMANITIES
Alex Mazzaferro is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a scholar of early American literature, working at the intersection of the history of science and the history of political thought. His current book project, No Newe Enterprize: The Innovation Prohibition and the New Science of Politics in the Colonial English Americas, rewrites the history of American colonialism in light of the fact that innovation was a forbidden activity and a pejorative synonym for rebellion in the early modern period. Tracking the emergence and contestation of settlements throughout North America and the Caribbean, he argues that New World elites rehabilitated and then monopolized the right to innovate by applying the empirical methods of natural science to politics. His articles have appeared in Early American Literature and Early American Studies. He has received research support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Chicago, the American Philosophical Society, and Rutgers University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2017.
FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION FELLOW IN THE HUNTINGTON-UC PROGRAM FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE HUMANITIES
Nydia Pineda de Ávila is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of San Diego, California and works at the intersection of the History of Science, the History of the Book and Art History between Early Modern Europe and the Americas. She completed a PhD in English at Queen Mary, University of London and was a postdoctoral fellow of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is co-curator of the digital exhibition Constellations: Reimagining Celestial Histories in the Early Americas at the John Carter Brown Library and Principal Investigator of the international and interdisciplinary research group “American Skies: Celestial Images as Technologies of Cultural Transfer”. She is currently completing a book manuscript on lunar maps between Europe and the Colonial Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. At The Huntington Library, she will be researching ways in which knowledge practices along the Pacific coast of New Spain affected the creation and representation of celestial and terrestrial environments.
Jonathan Koch is a postdoctoral instructor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech and fellow in the 2020-2022 Caltech Huntington Humanities Collaboration. He received his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. His work focuses on the literatures and history of religion and politics in early modern England and has appeared in Studies in Philology and The Review of English Studies. He is currently working on a book entitled The Poetics of Religious Toleration in Revolutionary England, which asks what toleration meant and how toleration was experienced and expressed by writers and readers in seventeenth-century England. At The Huntington, Jonathan will trace the concept and practice of religious forbearance into the marketplace, exploring the relationship between economics and the spirit, between markets and moralities, in the book trade of early modern Europe.
TRAVEL GRANTS
Olivia Dill, Doctoral Candidate, Northwestern University
“Too Beautiful to be Described”: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Descriptive Challenges of Labor and Sheen in Early Modern Insect Imagery
Diego Luis, Fellow, Davidson College
Transpacific Spiritualities: Native and Black Responses to Global Empire
Anthony Meyer, Doctoral Candidate, UCLA
The Art of Making Gifts: Nahua Leaders and Religious Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic World
Jennifer Rabedeau, Doctoral Candidate, Cornell University
Medieval Afterlives: Ornament & Empire in Victorian Britain
Hannah Smith, Doctoral Candidate, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities
“A Monstrous Incongruity”: Midwives, Childbirth, and Power over the Pregnant Body in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1750-1840
Danny Zborover, Lecturer, Mexico-Pacific Rim Project and Field School
The Derrotero and Hack’s Atlases: A New Look at Indigenous and Pirates on the Mexican Pacific Coast
