November 2018 is here, and with Thanksgiving approaching, the Kluge Center welcomed four new fellows into residence. Here are the projects they will be working on:
Gianandrea Nodari, our incoming Kluge Fellow, arrived from El Colegio de Mexico. During his residency, Gianandrea will focus on his project, “The Monetary History of the Mexican Revolution, 1913-1918.” While in residence, Gianandrea will examine local Mexican newspapers in the Newspaper Microfilm collection, diplomatic and consular reports of U.S. government officials in Mexico, as well as the personal papers of figures such as Henry Prather Fletcher, William H. Taft, Robert Lansing, and Frederick Dixon. He hopes to offer a complete overview of the economic, political, and social transformations that characterized the process of creating a new Mexican monetary system. His ultimate goal is to shed light on the shaping of monetary sovereignty in Mexico which went hand in hand with the construction of the new revolutionary state.
Charlotte Rogers, our incoming Lovelace Fellow, arrived from the University of Virginia. During her residency, Charlotte will conduct research on her project, “Dancing through the Storm: Creative Responses to Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean.” While in residence, Charlotte will use the Lomax Collections to study how individuals and communities from the Caribbean and Southern United States have created artistic responses to hurricanes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She hopes to show how creating art in the midst and aftermath of storms assuages survivors’ suffering, memorializes victims, provides a call to political action, encourages resilience to disaster, and inscribes environmental upheaval into cultural memory. Her work hopes to call attention to the creative ways marginalized peoples of the Greater Caribbean overcome disasters.
Joshua Kopin, our first incoming Swann Fellow, arrived from the University of Texas, Austin. Joshua seeks to analyze how comics coalesced in the United States as a distinctly mass, modern, and popular form at the end of the nineteenth century. He argues that as comics diverged from caricature and cartoon, they came quickly to bridge distinct moments in time. He observes that this can be seen in the formal debt that comics owe to the chronophotographs of Edweard Muybridge. He will explore collections in the Prints & Photographs, Serials, and Rare Book & Special Collections Divisions.
Jillian Vaum, our second incoming Swann Fellow, arrived from the University of Pennsylvania. Jillian has observed that increased visibility of free African Americans in the civic, economic, and social life of northern antebellum cities engendered frequent representation in genre paintings, minstrel shows, and the pictorial press. She contends that caricatures of free black life, political cartoons responding to abolitionist activity, and mass distribution of minstrelsy ephemera shaped the way antebellum portraiture could be rendered or understood. She plans to focus her study mainly on research scenes of free black labor and urban life, music covers, and minstrel posters in the Prints & Photographs Division collections.
Check back next month for more arriving scholars. Click here for the full list of scholars currently in residence.