Contact Information
(press inquiries only)
The New York Public Library
Public Relations Office
188 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
phone: 212.592.7700
fax: 212.592.7729
New Fellows Named for Seventh Year of The New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
New York City, August 19, 2005 - Irish literature, the politics of jazz, migrant labor and public health in Central America, the Jewish and Islamic roots of the poetry of Judah Halevi, the architectural development of New York City, Victorian sexuality, and a novel about Stephen Crane are just a few of the projects that will be pursued by the fifteen Fellows recently appointed to The New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers for 2005-2006. The names of the seventh class of Fellows were announced by Library President Paul LeClerc and Jean Strouse, the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Center.
The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers offers a nine-month fellowship that allows academics, independent scholars, and creative writers to work at the Library on projects involving use of its collections. Each Fellow receives a stipend and office space in the Center's quarters on the second floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, and the members of each annual class are encouraged to share ideas with each other and the larger New York intellectual community. The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center has become a highly regarded forum for spirited discourse, particularly through its lunch-time presentations and evening public programs. Writings by current Fellows at the Center routinely appear in local and national publications.
The appointees for the class of 2005-2006 were chosen by a distinguished selection committee. A broad spectrum of interests and projects is reflected in the group. This year there were 267 applicants from 18 countries.
Paul LeClerc, President of The New York Public Library, said, "As we begin the seventh year of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, we can truly say that we have exceeded our highest expectations for the talent and erudition that this initiative brings home to the Library. Each year, scholars make daily use of the Library's vast collections and add to the Library's remarkable and long-standing history of scholarship. The Cullman Center gives our Fellows the time and support to concentrate on their work, which has resulted in a remarkable outpouring of creativity each year."
The fifteen Fellows come to the Library from diverse and distinguished backgrounds. Charlotte Bacon is a novelist and Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire; Brent Hayes Edwards is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University; and Robert Jenkinsserves as Professor of Political Science at the University of London. Wendy Lesser is founding editor of The Threepenny Review and the author of a novel and six books of nonfiction; Lucy McDiarmid is the author of The Irish Art of Controversy, Auden's Apologies for Poetry, and Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars; and Jill McDonough is a poet whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and Slate. Andrew Meier, the Moscow correspondent for Time magazine from 1996 to 2001 and author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, will be the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow at the Center, as he works on his next book, The American Professor: A Biography of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York Intellectual Turned Stalinist Secret Agent.
Mary Morrissy is the author of a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye, and two novels, Mother of Pearl and The Pretender. Joseph O'Connor is known for his novels Cowboys and Indians, Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, and Star of the Sea. Samuel Roberts is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University and Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health; Raymond Scheindlin is Professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a former provost of the Seminary; and Rebecca Read Shanor is the author of The City That Never Was: 200 Years of Plans That Might Have Changed the Face of New York . Kirk Davis Swinehart, Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University, will be the Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History at the Center as he works on Molly's War: The Other American Revolution, a book about the soldier-adventurer Sir William Johnson and his 20-year relationship with a Mohawk woman. Judith R. Walkowitz is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and Edmund White is the author of a biography of Jean Genet, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a short life of Proust, among other books.
"The class of 2005-2006 is an ambitious and accomplished group," said Director Jean Strouse. "We are very much looking forward to another year at the Cullman Center in which the confluence of ideas promises to make each day exciting. This year's Fellows are exploring topics that touch on developments close at hand as well as those across the globe, in the present century and in the past. I suspect that our public events will be of great interest to New Yorkers and particularly well attended this year."
About the Humanities and Social Sciences Library Housed in the magnificent Beaux-Arts landmark building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, the Humanities and Social Sciences Library is renowned for collecting, preserving and making freely accessible to the public an astounding range of documents charting human history and cultural expression. Counted among its literary treasures, for example, are the first Gutenberg Bible to come to the New World; Shakespeare's first folio; a copy of the first printed book in America, the so-called Bay Psalm Book; the manuscripts of George Washington's Farewell Address; and Thomas Jefferson's handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence.
About The New York Public Library
The New York Public Library was created in 1895 with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox with the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. The Library provides free and open access to its physical and electronic collections and information, as well as to its services. It comprises four research centers - the Humanities and Social Sciences Library; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Science, Industry and Business Library - and 85 Branch Libraries in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Research and circulating collections combined total more than 50 million items, including materials for the visually impaired. In addition, each year the Library presents thousands of exhibitions and public programs, which include classes in technology, literacy, and English as a second language. The Library serves some 13 million patrons who come through its doors annually and another 13 million users internationally, who access collections and services through the NYPL website, www.nypl.org.
The New York Public Library
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
2005-2006 Fellows
Charlotte Bacon Surveying with Everest: A Novel Charlotte Bacon, an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, has published three works of fiction: two novels - Lost Geography and There is Room for You - and a collection of short stories, A Private State. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and won the PEN/Hemingway Prize for First Fiction. At the Cullman Center she will be working on a novel set in India in the 1830s.
Brent Hayes Edwards Alternate Tracks: The Politics of Experimentation and Collaboration in New York Jazz, 1972-1982 Brent Hayes Edwards is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University. His first book, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, won the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. Edwards co-edited the 2004 collection of essays, Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, and has since 2001 been co-editor of the journal Social Text.
Robert Jenkins Nationalists, Imperialists and Global Utopias: Mid-20 th Century Movements for World Government in India and the United States Robert Jenkins is Professor of Political Science at the University of London. His research has focused on India, particularly the politics of India's integration into the global economy and its relationship with institutions of global governance. His books include Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India and Reinventing Accountability: Making Democracy Work for Human Development. He has received research grants from the Ford Foundation, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and the British Academy, and has consulted for the UN, the World Bank, and the governments of Germany, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.
Wendy Lesser Photography and Non-fiction Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. She is the author of six books of nonfiction, including The Amateur and Pictures at an Execution; her first novel, The Pagoda in the Garden, will be published in October, 2005. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Arts Journalism Program, and a winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Lucy McDiarmid The Peacock Dinner: Blunt, Yeats, Pound & the Transmission of Culture Lucy McDiarmid is the author of The Irish Art of Controversy, Auden's Apologies for Poetry, and Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars. She co-edited High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture 1889 - 1939, and Lady Gregory: Selected Writings. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is a Professor of English at Villanova University. At the Cullman Center, she will do research on a testimonial dinner given on January 18, 1914, by W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Lady Gregory in honor of the poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
Jill McDonough Dying Game: 50 Executions in American History (Poetry) Jill McDonough's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and Slate. She received her M. A. from Boston University's Creative Writing Program in poetry in 1998, and has received fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A 2005 PEN/New England Discovery Award winner, she teaches writing for Boston University's Prison Education Project.
Andrew Meier--Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow The American Professor: A Biography of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York Intellectual turned Stalinist Secret Agent Andrew Meier, Moscow correspondent for Time magazine from 1996 to 2001, is the author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall. A contributor to Harper's, The Financial Times Magazine, and National Geographic, he writes widely on Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
Mary Morrissy The Duchess: A Novel Exploring the Life of Sean O'Casey's Sister, Bella Mary Morrissy is the author of a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye and two novels, Mother of Pearl and The Pretender. Her stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, and Mother of Pearl was shortlisted for The Whitbread Prize. She received a Lannan Award for Literature in 1995. Morrissy, who lives in Ireland, has worked as a journalist and fiction reviewer, and has taught in creative writing programs at the Universities of Arkansas and Iowa.
Joseph O'Connor Redemption: A Novel of Irish Immigrants, Especially Children, in the American Civil War Joseph O'Connor's novels include Cowboys and Indians, Desperadoes, The Salesman, Inishowen, and Star of the Sea, which was published in 26 languages and received the Prix Littéraire Européan Madeleine Zepter for European novel of the year, Ireland's Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Literary Award, the Irish Post Award for Fiction, France's Prix Millepages, a Nielsen-BookScan Golden Book Award, and an American Library Association Notable Book listing. O'Connor, who lives in Dublin, has also written short stories, film scripts, plays, and a critical biography of the poet Charles Donnelly.
Samuel Roberts Migrant Labor and Public Health in Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, 1850-1945 Samuel Roberts is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University and Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. His forthcoming book, Infectious Fear: Tuberculosis, Public Health, and the Logic of Race and Illness in Baltimore, Maryland, 1880-1930, explores public health and urban politics in the Jim Crow South. In 2001-2002, Roberts was a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Black History and Culture (New York City).
Raymond Scheindlin The Pilgrimage Poetry of Judah Halevi Raymond Scheindlin is Professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a former provost of the Seminary. He specializes in the encounter of Hebrew and Arabic cultures in the Middle Ages, especially as embodied in the poetry of the two traditions. His books include Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life, which deals with medieval secular poetry, and The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul, which deals with medieval religious poetry--as well as a verse translation of the Book of Job. As a Cullman Center fellow, he will be writing about the Jewish and Islamic roots of the pilgrimage poetry of Judah Halevi (d. 1141).
Rebecca Read Shanor Building New York City, 1626-2006 Rebecca Read Shanor, who writes about New York City history, architecture, and urban planning, is the author of The City That Never Was: 200 Years of Plans That Might Have Changed the Face of New York. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Kirk Davis Swinehart--Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History Molly's War: The Other American Revolution Kirk Davis Swinehart, Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University, is writing a book about the soldier-adventurer Sir William Johnson and his feuding families, Irish and Mohawk, both of which fought for Britain during the American Revolution. Among other things, the book will examine Johnson's twenty-year relationship with a Mohawk woman--Molly Brant--and her struggle to maintain the Mohawks' alliance with George III. Swinehart has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon and Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundations.
Judith Walkowitz Cosmopolitanism and the Pleasure Economy: Soho, London and Its Commercial Peripheries, 1890-1939 Judith R. Walkowitz is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches British and Women's history. Her research and writing have concentrated on the cultural and social contests over sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (winner of the Berkshire Prize) and City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London.
Edmund White Hotel de Dream: A Novel about Stephen Crane Edmund White has written twenty books, including a long biography of Jean Genet (for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and a short life of Proust. He is best known for his trilogy of novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. He directs the creative writing program at Princeton. His most recent book was Fanny: A Fiction, a historical novel about Frances Wright and Frances Trollope.
