In the month of November the Kluge Center welcomed five new scholars to the Library. Below are summaries of two of their research projects.
Hannah Clark is a newly arrived Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bristol. During her residency, Hannah will be working on her project, “From Melton Mowbray to Middleburg: Trans-Atlantic Dialogues in Fashionable Fox-hunting, 1870-1930.” Clark is furthering her research into Anglo-American cultural relations between 1870-1930, with a particular focus on how established and newly emerging elites on both sides of the Atlantic adopted and re-fashioned the traditional ‘elite’ pursuit of fox-hunting to support ideas of legacy, tradition, national identity and history. In particular, she will explore networks of elite fox-hunting in the sporting capitals of Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, UK, and Middleburg, Virginia.
The transnational and comparative doctoral research topic of her research make the Library’s holdings of primary and secondary resources highly important to the American side of her project. Two such collections are the Frances Benjamin Johnston Photographic collection and the wider Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South, which includes interiors and contents of hunting properties around Middleburg, and Foxcroft School. Clark is also looking at examples of elite American tastes for Old World antiques and sporting art located in the records of antique dealers and auction houses such as the Raoul Heilbronner Papers. Important industrialists and political figures with hunting connections in the U.S. and UK will be explored in the Manuscript Division: the papers of Moreton Frewen, Henry White, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert H. Terrell, Owen Wister, General William Mitchell, Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt.
Jennifer Baum Sevec is a new Kluge Staff Fellow. She will be working on her project, “Studying the Interdisciplinary Nature of Digital Technologies in Modern Culture.” Baum Sevec is a senior librarian at the Library of Congress who was originally hired as a Russian cataloger in 2003. Her work at the Library primarily focuses on the areas of access metadata, special collections acquisitions, strategic and digital initiatives, business/systems analysis, and web development. Thriving on the interplay of ideas, creativity, innovation, and collaboration, Baum Sevec is a strong advocate for the breadth and depth of the Library of Congress collections, services, and the extraordinary staff who bring it to life. She is dedicated to the crucial role cultural heritage institutions play in all societies.
Baum Sevec’s project investigates our understandings of how the foundations of the digital world have and are influencing modern culture. The purpose of her research is to continue to build on a larger story of understanding how things work in our digital world while illustrating the interconnections among the humanities, sciences, informatics, and information theory. The research celebrates the breadth and depth of a story that navigates from ancient foundations to modern day technology and its penetration in modern culture. The research explores four main threads: powering the digital world; inventors, innovators and maker culture; universality of belief; and paradox in the digital world.
Additional scholars who arrived in the month of November were:
- Adrian Browne
British Research Council Fellow, Durham University, “The Politics of Landscape and Identity in North-Western Uganda’s Albertine Borderlands since 1864.” - Rhian Keyse
British Research Council Fellow, University of Exeter, “Forced and Early Marriage in British Colonial Africa, c. 1927-55.” - Emma Milne
British Research Council Fellow, University of Essex, “Infanticidal Mothers: An Examination of the Responses by the Criminal Justice System in the State of Maryland and US Federal Law.”
No new scholars arrived in December. Check back in 2016 to see a list of our January arrivals. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.