The John W. Kluge Center is pleased to announce the arrival of three new scholars in residence at the Library of Congress.
Rolena Adorno was appointed as Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South.
Adorno is Sterling Professor of Spanish at Yale University and the author of Colonial Latin American LIterature: A Very Short Introduction (2011), the prize-winning The Polemics of Possession in Early Spanish American Narrative (2007), and the co-authored Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1999), which was awarded prizes by the American Historical Association, the Western Historical Association, and the New England Council on Latin American Studies.
Adorno’s project, “Discovering America,” explores Spain’s conquests in the New World as they were given meaning by nineteenth-century U.S. writers as they founded our national literature and discovered their own Americas. As Adorno puts it, “From Thomas Jefferson’s Spanish book-collecting and hemispheric Americanist vision to Mark Twain’s mutterings about Hernando de Soto’s failure to grasp the importance of the great Mississippi River, these Anglo-American ‘discoverers’ of what was once Spain’s America help us understand the ways our globalizing national story has been told.”
The Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South focuses on the history and cultures of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania, using the foreign language collections in the specialized reading rooms of the Library of Congress.
Maya Jasanoff was appointed as Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North.
Jasanoff, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University, is the author of New York Times Best Book of 2017 and Cundill Prize in History winner The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017), as well as National Book Critics Circle Award and George Washington Book Prize winner Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011), which was researched at the Kluge Center, and Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750 – 1850 (2005).
At the Kluge Center, Jasanoff will research a major new project on the role of ancestry and genealogy in people’s lives, from the beginnings of human history to the present age of DNA ancestry testing.
The Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North focuses on the history and cultures of North America, Europe, Russia, and East Asia, using the immense foreign language collections in the specialized reading rooms of the Library of Congress.
Melvin L. Rogers was appointed Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kluge Center.
Rogers, an associate professor of political science at Brown University is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (2008).
At the Kluge Center, Rogers will explore the political and philosophical thinking of African American intellectuals, activists, and artists in a book-length project titled The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought.
Rogers will draw from several collections at the Library including abolitionist periodicals as well as print and photographic material about anti-lynching movements found in the Prints and Photographs Division.