The Kluge Center welcomes four new fellows into residence this January. Get to know them and the projects they will be working on.
Jamie Fenton, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellow, will arrive from Cambridge University. Jamie will work on a project titled, “‘On Whose Forbidden Ear’: Hearing and Its Limits in the Poetry of the American Civil War.” He will spend his fellowship working in several collections, including the Civil War Manuscripts Collection, the Thomas Edison collections, the Samuel Morse collections, as well as the Library’s catalogue of 19th Century periodicals.
George Morris, an AHRC Fellow, will also come to the Library this month from the University of Cambridge. George will work on “Intimacy, Subjectivity and Psychic Research in the Harry Houdini Collection.” Using the Harry Houdini Collection, he will examine the role intimacy played in the production of psychic phenomena from 1860-1914, and hopes to use this collection to analyze a broader culture of intimacy in this time period.
Sarah Smeed, an AHRC Fellow, will arrive from the University of Kent. Sarah will concentrate on “Consuming Appearances: Head Styling and Image in Euro-Indigenous Relations.” She will work with collections featuring the work of David B. Quinn, Richard Hakluyt, Marian S. Carson, Bernard Romans, Mary Rowlandson, and others. Sarah will examine these materials in order to investigate the ways Native American head styling practices were described, comprehended, and used within the frameworks of early modern cultural beliefs.
Yuwu Song, an incoming Kluge Staff Fellow, came to the Kluge Center this month from the Asian Division of the Library of Congress. Yuwu will conduct research on his project, “Book Censorship in Post-Tiananmen China (1989-2019).” He will examine the Library’s collection of Chinese books published in mainland China and examine how censorship causes them to differ from the same works when published in other countries. He will also scrutinize privately printed memoirs donated to the Library by authors who cannot publish in China or elsewhere due to censorship. Yuwu hopes that gaining access to these works side-by-side will enhance his project, which explores the trajectory of the so-called ideological purification in book publishing since 1989, after the Tiananmen Massacre.
Check back next month for more arriving scholars. Click here for the full list of scholars currently in residence.