Meet the 2022-2023 Cohort of Lapidus Center Fellows

The Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery—funded by a generous $2.5 million gift from Ruth and Sid Lapidus matched by The New York Public Library—generates and disseminates scholarly knowledge on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery pertaining to the Atlantic World.

The Center offers long- and short-term fellowships to researchers who receive access to the Center's collections, opportunities to disseminate their work across Library channels, and monetary support.

Meet the 2022–2023 cohort of Lapidus Center fellows.

Arielle Xena Alterwaite is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania who studies slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world with a focus on France and its empire.

She is broadly interested in histories of political economy, capitalism, national sovereignty, abolition, reparations, and imperialism. Her dissertation addresses the specific case of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity, in which she explores Haiti's sovereign debt in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution and argues for the international significance of the debt for finance, monetary systems, nation-making, and political thought in the first half of the 19th century.

Edward Ball is the author of six books of history and biography that tell stories about enslavement, white and Black family history, genetics, gender transition, and other subjects.

His first book, Slaves in the Family (1998), an account of 10 African American families who were once enslaved on plantations owned by the author’s own family in South Carolina, received the National Book Award for nonfiction. His most recent book, Life of a Klansman (2020), is a biography of a marauder in the Ku Klux Klan, Edward’s great-grandfather, a carpenter in New Orleans who fought to restore white supremacy to Louisiana. Ball has taught at Yale University and the State University of New York, and has been awarded fellowships by the Radcliffe Institute, at Harvard, New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other institutions.

David Luis-Brown is an associate professor in the departments of Cultural Studies and English at Claremont Graduate University.

He is the author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States and, more recently, “La Escalera, Sentiment and Revolution in the Nineteenth-Century Novel” in African American Literature in Transition, 1750-2015: Volume 4: 1830-1850, edited by Benjamin Fagan. 

His translation and critical edition of Andrés Avelino de Orihuela’s Cuban novel, The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A Cuban Antislavery Novel (1852) was published by the University of Virginia Press in the spring of 2022. He is currently writing two books. His work on the translation has led to the project, Antislaveries in Dos Hemisferios: Cosmopolitan Intimacies, Print Culture and Revolutionary Imaginaries of Blackness and Latinidad. He is also at work on the book manuscript Blazing at Midnight: Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in Cuban and U.S. Literature and Culture.