Happy New Year from the Kluge Center.
The Center is preparing for a busy and exciting 2015. This year we’ll be celebrating our 15th anniversary and we’ll also be awarding the Kluge Prize. As 2014 came to a close and we embark on 2015, the Center welcomed seven new fellows during the months of December and January.
Katrin Weller is one of our inaugural recipients of the Kluge Fellowships in Digital Studies. Katrin is based at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany where she is a post-doctoral researcher. During her residency at the Kluge Center, Katrin will be working on her project entitled “Studying Historical Events Based on Big Data and Online (Social) Media.”
The project opens up a new perspective in social media research: how can social media data become a potential source for future historians? In order to understand the role of different social media platforms, both in contrast to other media formats and as a potential source for historians, their nature and characteristics have to be recognized, decoded and documented. The project aims to build a foundation for the use of social media and other big online data as resources for historical studies. Her work with the Library of Congress Web Archives will create case studies that can become the basis of a more comprehensive book on the digital traces of user-generated content.
Bonny Brooks is a newly arrived Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow who is pursuing her Ph.D. at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. A full-time writer, she is working on a novel about North Korean defectors and the “underground railroad” movement that spirits refugees out of China to South Korea. This project is timely and interesting considering the recent attention on the world’s most isolated regime.
Since there is almost no visual media available from inside North Korea, Bonny’s work is an effort to bring the atrocities of North Korea to life through fictional characters. She will be examining the North Korean propaganda materials held in the Library of Congress collections, including films, books and posters, as well as CIA-donated materials such as detailed maps. She will also be juxtaposing North Korean propaganda against her own interviews and fieldwork with North Korean defectors. This exploration of competing North Korean narratives will form the backdrop for her creative writing practice here at the Library.
Additional scholars who arrived in December and January are:
- Maximilian Buschmann
Bavarian Fellow, 2014, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, “The Global History of Modern Hunger Strikes.” - Rosamund Cole
British Research Council Fellow, 2014, Royal Northern College of Music, “Study of Lilli Lehmann Diaries.” - Amy Edwards
British Research Council Fellow, 2014, University of Birmingham, “Thatcherism and ‘Financial Consumerism’: Private Ownership, Consumerism and Citizenship in Britain c. 1975-1990.” - Edward Falvey
British Research Council Fellow, 2014, University of Exeter, “Locating the Cinematic City: Urban Iconography and Transformation, and the Birth of New York City, 1890-1930.” - Gemma Scott
British Research Council Fellow, 2014, Keele University, “Gender, Power, and the Emergency in India.” - Julia Young
Kluge Fellow, 2014, Catholic University, “Cristero Diaspora: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees during Mexico’s Religious War.”
Check back next month for scholars arriving in the month of February. Click here for the full list of scholars currently in residence at the Kluge Center.