This session introduces new fellowship opportunities for international research. The American Trust for the British Library Fellowship offers early-career scholars the opportunity to do research at the British Library and at a US research collection. The Houghton Library at Harvard is the first partner institution, and the ATBL is adding others every year. The Library Company of Philadelphia's Davida A. Deutsch Research Fellowship is a partner Fellowship program that sponsors research projects at the Library Company and at the British Library. The Fellows who were awarded these grants for 2020-21 will present their projects in the session, and a representative of the ATBL will answer questions about the Fellowship opportunity.
Lauren Eriks Cline, Assistant Professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, was awarded the first American Trust for the British Library Fellowship at Houghton Library. This visiting fellowship, a joint initiative between the two institutions, supports a research project that draws on primary source materials in the collections of both the British Library and Houghton Library.
Dr. Eriks Cline teaches courses in drama, film, and the novel; literary and cultural theory; and British literature across periods. She will spend two weeks in London and two weeks at Harvard conducting research for her book project, Restaging Race: Victorian Spectators and Imperial Performance Narrative, which considers the ways in which popular performance was used as a tool of the British empire. In four chapters, she analyzes the careers of four stage performers—Frances Kemble, Edmund Kean, Ira Aldridge, and Ellen Terry—to investigate how tropes of nineteenth-century narrative and spectator accounts of theatrical performance shaped the ways Victorians conceptualized race and the racism endemic to the British imperial project. Both libraries contain considerable collections on all four performers.
Atesede Makonnen's American Trust for the British Library Fellowship is also based at teh Houghton Library, funded by the ATBL Advisory Council and Johns Hopkins University Libraries. Ms. Makonnen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a BA in English from Dartmouth College and an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London.
Her dissertation, “The Actual Sight of the Thing: Visualizing Blackness in Nineteenth Century British Culture,” examines how white visualization of black bodies in nineteenth century British culture led to the creation of a modern white gaze. The project investigates theatrical practice, children’s stories, poetry, novels and portraiture in order to argue that the successes of the British abolition movement inspired a new wave of anti-blackness and social segregation reliant on complex visual understandings of racial hierarchy. She plans to use the Harvard Theatre Collection at Houghton Library to explore the relationship between black actors, white actors, and Othello. Her time at the British Library will be devoted to the writings of Thomas Clarkson and other abolitionists, as well as Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Rachel Burke, a PhD student at Harvard, was awarded the first Davida T. Deutsch Fellowship. Her topic is the African-American anti-slavery activist Henry "Box" Brown, who in 1849 escaped slavery by shipping himself by railway from Virginia to Philadelphia. Brown fled to England in the 1850s. At first, he was an anti-slavery celebrity but after the Civil War he became more of an entertainer, best known for his moving panorama, “Mirror of Slavery,” which he toured all over Britain. Burke will discuss records of his appearances in newspapers, ephemera collections, and other sources at the British Library.