The following lists of fellows include recipients of Hagley’s short-term research grants and fellowships (exploratory and H.B. du Pont), as well as all our long-term fellowships (Henry Belin du Pont dissertation fellowships, the former Jefferson Scholar/Hagley Library dissertation fellowships now known as Galambos/Hagley Library dissertation fellowships, and NEH-Hagley fellowships). Please note that where names appear more than once, they have received more than one award (for instance, a one-week exploratory grant followed by a longer research grant).
| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015
2024
Long Term Fellows
Maia Silber (Lou Galambos Fellowship, 9 months)
Odd Jobs: Labor, Politics, and Precarity from the New Deal to the War on Poverty
Maia Silber is a graduate student at Princeton University. Her dissertation examines how Americans—policymakers, unions, activists, and ordinary workers—contended with the tension between the New Deal’s promise of steady work and the reality of irregular employment following the Second World War. Drawing on repositories across the country, she traces debates about the causes of and remedies for “broken work” as they played out across the nation’s midcentury political institutions. Industrial unionists campaigned for a guaranteed annual wage to address the toll of intermittent layoffs and inadequate unemployment compensation; child labor reformers aimed to strengthen labor standards to shield young people from abuse in part-time and summer jobs; civil rights activists fought to desegregate public employment services that limited the opportunities available to seasonal farmworkers; and new occupational unions sought to decasualize the low- wage service sector through new forms of collective bargaining. Across these connected struggles, the idea of the “steady job” shaped advocates’ demands even as it limited the possibilities for realizing them. She will be in residence at Hagley from Sept. 2, 2024 through May 31, 2025.
Cory Fischer-Hoffman (NEH-Hagley Fellow, 6 months)
Empire of Dirt: A History of Bethlehem Steel, Extraction & Globalization
Cory Fischer-Hoffman teaches Latina American history at Lafayette College. Her NEH-funded research focuses on transnational flows of labor and raw materials in the late 19th and 20th centuries through a close study of the Bethlehem Steel’s activities in Latin America. She particularly explores the linkages between Bethlehem’s steel manufacturing operations in the US and its subsidiary mining operations in Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Mexico and Brazil. Drawing on Hagley collections that document Bethlehem’s activities, her preliminary findings challenge the existing narrative that the demise of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation can be blamed on globalization. Instead, her research unravels how Bethlehem was an architect and beneficiary of globalization. Its global supply chains, a racialized international division of labor, and construction of the transport infrastructure required for international trade made Bethlehem Steel Corporation a major instigator of globalization. She will be in residence at Hagley from Jan 2, 2025 to June 30, 2025.
Joris Mercelis (NEH-Hagley Fellow, 6 months)
The Long Shadow of Kodak: Market Dominance and Scientific Control in Twentieth Century Photography
Joris Mercelis is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Beyond Bakelite: Leo H. Baekeland (1863-1944) and the Business of Science and Invention (MIT Press, 2020). His new project explores Kodak's influence over twentieth-century photographic knowledge production and dissemination and that evaluates the consequences of the company's central position in photographic knowledge networks. It contributes to five interconnected strands of research: the history of industrial science and R&D; laboratory studies; the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century “Americanization” of industry and science; the transnational and transregional/global circulation of scientific and technical knowledge; and the history of scientific and medical photography and imaging. By considering these different themes individually and collectively, he assesses how and with what consequences Kodak and a relatively small number of other industrial corporations came to dominate an entire (sub)area of science and technology, the investigation and application of chemical photography. He plans to be in residence at Hagley from Sept. 2, 2024 to Feb, 28, 2025.
Melanie Sheehan (NEH-Hagley Fellow, 4 months)
Struggling to Adjust: US Labor Unions and Global Competition, 1940s-1980s
Melanie Sheehan has received a number of postdoctoral fellowships after receiving PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is working on her book manuscript, tentatively entitled Struggling to Adjust: US Labor Unions and Global Competition, 1940s-1980s, that explains how US labor union leaders and their government allies attempted, but ultimately failed, to manage structural economic change and to adapt their own institutions to a globalizing economy after World War II. It will argue that US labor union leaders actively engaged in global conversations about how to promote a more economically integrated world in the post-World War II decades. Yet US union leaders' power to influence international economic policies remained limited, as their conceptions of a just globalization met head on with competing views among business leaders, foreign trade unionists, and political leaders from across the United States, Western Europe, and the Global South. She will be in residence January 15, 2025-May 15, 2025 after completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Kenyon College.
Evan Brown (HB du Pont Dissertation Fellowship, 4 months)
Organized Baseball: Reworking the Transnational Circuit, 1946-1965
Evan Brown is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. His dissertation examines the political economy of professional baseball across North America and the Caribbean as it underwent a social and economic transformation from 1946 to 1965. It argues that the interrelation of racial desegregation, international competition, and labor militancy created a crisis for the monopoly system that defined the industry. Drawing on internal business documents, legislative investigations, personal correspondence, and oral histories, it shows how so-called "Organized Baseball" turned to labor markets, political institutions, and new sources of revenue to weather this crisis. The outcome of this struggle set the pattern for the explosive growth of the sport industry in second half of the 20th century - while also producing new tensions through which the next generation of athletes would contest the power structures of sport. He will be in residence at Hagley from Aug. 15, 2024 through Dec. 15, 2024.
2023
Long Term Fellows
Sam Schirvar (Louis Galambos National Fellowship in Business and Politics, 9 months)
"Manufacturing Self-Determination"
Sam Schirvar is the 2023-2024 Louis Galambos National Fellowship in Business and Politics at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation and the Hagley Library. A graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, he studies twentieth century United States and Native American history with a focus on technology, politics, labor, and economic development. Schrivar’s dissertation, “Manufacturing Self-Determination,” is a history of assembly plants in Native American communities from the 1940s to the 1990s. It investigates how many reservations went from being destinations of plant relocation in the mid-twentieth century to harboring tribally-owned enterprises that remain regional anchors in struggling rural economies into the twenty-first century. The dissertation argues that tribal governments, facing settler public and private dispossession, fought for expanded roles as regional investors and employers—roles they were uniquely positioned to play due to their distinctive union of sovereignty, economic power, and deep ties to place.
His research has previously been supported by the Tomash Fellowship at the Charles Babbage Institute; a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship at the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Air and Space Museum; a Research Fellowship from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; and several grants from the University of Pennsylvania
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden (NEH-Hagley Fellow, 8 months)
Music, Sound, and the du Pont Women's World: From French Revolution to American Civil War
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden is in the department of Music History, Theory, Ethnomusicology at University of North Texas. Her project is titled “Music, Sound, and the du Pont Women's World: From French Revolution to American Civil War.” As a historian of French music and sound studies she will trace the place of music in the households of the French emigres and descendants – especially the du Ponts – of the early 19th century through the documents and material culture held by Hagley. Music and sound poignantly, sometimes painfully articulate the du Pont women's deep ambivalences about being women and being French in America. While these materials address gender, they simultaneously illuminate issues of religion, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, providing a window out onto the du Pont's local community and its wider national and global contexts. She will be in residence September 15, 2023-May 15, 2024.
Short Term Fellows
Exploratory Grant
Nicolas Allen
Ph.D. Candidate
SUNY at Stony Brook
A Voz do dono: RCA-Victor in Brazil
Roland Betancourt
Professor
University of California, Irvine
A Plurality of Means: Disneyland and the Aesthetics of Automation
Sam Bisco
AB Candidate
Princeton University
Evolution of the Cotton Gin Production
Espen Brandt
Masters
University of Oslo
International Trade Organization
Stephen Case
Professor
Olivet Nazarene University
Icons of the Idyllic: Windpumps and the American Pastoral Ideal
Graham Clure
Visiting Researcher
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Du Pont's Equinoctial Republics
Penelope Dean
Professor of Architecture
University of Illinois at Chicago
Management as Design
Sam Franz
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Pennsylvania
From Computer Centers to Computer Science: The Political Economy of American Universities and the Rise of Computing, 1950-1990
Leo Garofalo
Associate Professor
Connecticut College
Afro-Andeans in a Black Pacific: Afro-Pervian Sailors, Smugglers, & Shipbuiders in Spanish America & Transpacific
Katlin Harris
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Sounding Industrial Empires: Welfare Capitalism, Sponsored Bands, and the Construction of Company
Stefka Hristova
Associate Professor
Michigan Technological University
Negating Visions: Cultural Memory and Media Negatives
Rebecca Janzen
Associate Professor
University of South Carolina
Mining Religion Sites and Extractive Industries Across the Americas
Liz Kambas
Ph.D. Candidate
Indiana University
A Tale of Two Families: The Lavoisiers, the du Ponts, and the Arsenal Laboratory
Madison Krall
Assistant Professor
Seton Hall University
Health Safety and Risk Communication at DuPont in the Mid-Twentieth Century
William Krause
Ph.D. Candidate
Vanderbilt University
Scientific Genius: A Cultural and Intellectual History of the Idea in Modern America, 1880-1990
Andrea Matwyshyn
Professor
Penn State
Techno Redux: Technology Competition Policy Lessons from the U.S. v. IBM Trial Materials
Elizabeth McCague
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Maryland, College Park
Equestrian Culture and Labor during the du Pont era at James Madison's Montpelier
Christopher Miller
Lecturer
The University of Glasgow
Independent Inventors to International Industries--The Birth and Development of the Modern Private Armaments Sector, 1860-1914
Hunter Moskowitz
Ph.D. Candidate
Northeastern University
Labor, Technology and Race in the Global Textile Industry: Lowell, Concord and Monterrey in the Early 19th Century
Fabienne Müller
Doctoral Researcher
University of Bremen
Neoliberal Idealogy in Trade Policy and Social Policy: The Examples of NAFTA and Health Care Reform in the 1990s
Jonathan Obert
Associate Professor
Amherst College
Arming the Body Politic: The Economic Origins of American Gun Rights
Frances O'Shaughnessy
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Washington
Black Revolution on the Sea Islands: Empire, Property, and the Emancipation of Humanity
Lauren Owens
Ph.D. Candidate
Florida State University
Managing Fertility and Reproductive Health in Eighteenth-Century France
Fabian Prieto-Ñañez
Assistant Professor
Virginia Tech
Infrastructures for Open Skies: The Impact of US Domestic Satellites on Media Distribution in the Americas in the 1980s
Andrew Robichaud
Associate Professor
Boston University
On Ice: America's Nineteenth-Century Ice Age and the Making of Modern Life
Jacob Saindon
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Kentucky
The Production of Commercial Attention: Advertising, Space, and New Media in the U.S.
Kara Schlichting
Associate Professor
Queen's College, CUNY
New York Cty's Urban Heat Island, 1860-1940
Amy Sopcak-Joseph
Assistant Professor
Wilkes University
Fashioning American Women: Godey's Lady's Book, Consumers, and Periodical Publishing in the Nineteenth Century
Moeko Yamazaki
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Oregon
Council on Union-Free Environment and the History of Antiunionism since the 1970s
H. B. du Pont Fellowship
Grigorios Antoniou
Ph.D. Candidate
National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
Forging the Global Industrial Network: International Conference (1957-1997)
Jacob Bruggerman
Ph.D. Candidate
Johns Hopkins University
Securing the System: Phone Phreaks, Computer Hackers, and Political order, 1963-2013
Gerard Fitzgerald
Visiting Fellow
The Greenhouse Center, University of Stavanger/UVA
The Nature of War: An Environmental History of Industrialization in the United States During World War I
Emily Godbey
Associate Professor
University of Iowa
A Dynamite Garden: The Crowninshield Garden of Ruins at the Hagley
Rebecca Janzen
Associate Professor
University of South Carolina
Mining Religion: Religious Sites and Extractive Industries Across the Americas
Peter Kovacs
Independent Scholar
Big Tobacco and American Broadcasting, 1923-1971
Jayita Sarkar
Senior Lecturer
University of Glasgow
Atomic Capitalism: A Global History
Sydney Watts
Associate Professor
University of Richmond
The Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey: Borderlands Migration in the Atlantic World, 1763-1815
Che Yeun
Ph.D. Candidate
Harvard University
Technologies of Cleanliness and Modern American Bodies, 1890-1970
2022
Long-Term Fellows
Anna Andrzejewski (NEH-Hagley Fellow, 6 months)
"The Creation of South Florida’s White, Middle-Class Retirement & Vacation Landscape, 1945-1970"
Dr. Andrzejewski’s project draws upon the Margolies collection of travel ephemera to explore the architectural and cultural history of vacation and retirement developments in coastal South Florida after World War II. The rapid growth of these kinds of communities reflected a regional, age-inflected form of postwar suburban leisure, revealing important, and as-yet unexamined, way in which suburbanization worked to bolster white, middle-class hegemony. Consisting of single-family homes, garden apartments, and low-rise condominiums surrounding recreational amenities and often lying adjacent to beaches, lakes, or estuaries, these kinds of developments reflected and enacted a racially and class bound form of leisure closely tethered to an image of South Florida as a tropical paradise.
Anna Andrzejewski is a faculty member in Art History and the Bradshaw Knight professor in Environmental Humanities in the Nelson Institute at UW Madison.
Trish Kahle (NEH-Hagley Fellow, 6 months)
"Confidence in Our System: How an Electric Utility Remade a Deindustrializing Energy System"
Dr. Kahle’s project examines deindustrialization as an energy transition, and the role of electric utilities, a previously underappreciated set of actors, in that process. Through close archival reconstruction, she will show how the Pennsylvania Power & Light Company (PP&L) shaped the rearrangement of the foundational categories of energetic and economic life as their service area deindustrialized. The PP&L service area was energy rich, both with hydropower and anthracite coal. In fact, PP&L’s service area sat atop the largest anthracite coal deposits in the world. The region was an industrial powerhouse for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the late twentieth century, however, the region experienced a painful process of deindustrialization which dramatically reshaped the region’s economy and social fabric. PP&L was not a bystander in that process. Instead, the utility actively worked to manage this transition to maintain the stability of the energy system they had built.
Trish Kahle is an assistant professor of History in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University Qatar.
William Angus McLeod IV (Louis Galambos National Fellowship in Business and Politics, 9 months)
McLeod is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a Louis Galambos National Fellow and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow.
Ph.D. Candidate. Education and History
University of Pennsylvania
"Industry on Parade": The Business Community and Vocational Education, 1940-1990
Sophie Fitzmaurice (H. B. du Pont Dissertation Fellowship (4 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of California, Berkeley
The Material Telegraph: An Environmental and Material History of the Technology that Wired America, c. 1840-1990
Short Term Fellows
Alexander Ames
Rosenbach Museum
Ships of Reason: The Enlightenment of Stephen Girard, and the Mariners Who Built his Merchant Empire
Jonathan Victor Baldoza
Ph.D. Candidate
Princeton University
Colonial Scientific Selves: Science and Knowledge Making in the Philippines under Empire
Jennifer Black
Associate Professor, History
Misericordia University
Consuming Deception: Counterfeit Commodities in American Culture
Janelle Blankenship
Associate Professor, Film Studies
University of Western Ontario
Science on the Screen: Exhibiting Optical Wonders (from Pepper's Physioscope to the Spencer Delineascope)
Michael Bivona
Ph.D. Candidate
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Secret Network: Origins and Development of the US Classified Internet, 1982-2006
Anders Bright
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Pennsylvania
Luck's Republic: Lotteries, Class, and Finance in Early America
Evan Brown
Ph.D. Candidate. History
Columbia Univrsity
Organized Baseball: Reworking the Transnational Circuit, 1946-1965
Christina Day
Chair, Fiber Department
Maryland Institute College of Art
"A Good Idea Just Better": Faux Flooring Design in the Early 20th Century
Madeleine Dungy
Postdoc, Modern History and Society
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Order and Rivalry: Rewriting the Rules of International Trade After the First World War
Karlynne Ejercito
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Southern California
Political Machines - American Business Activism in the Philippines and the Role of Technology in the Reformist Imagination
Daniel Ewert
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Princeton University
The Paper Prison: Fingerprinting and Criminal Background Checks in Modern America
Roxanne Goldberg
Ph.D. Candidate
MIT
Selling and Salvaging 'the Orient' : U.S. Circuits of Islamic Art, 1870-1940
Minseok Jang
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Albany
How to See Oil from Consumers' Perspective
Elizabeth Koehn
Ph.D. Candidate, Decorative Arts, Design History
Bard Graduate Center
Utopian Shores: Visionary Plastic Design and its Limits in the Long 1960s
Peter Kovacs
Independent Scholar, History
Big Tobacco and American Broadcasting, 1923-1971
Clara Latham
Assistant Professor
The New School
From the Home to the Factory: Female RCA Laborers in the 1930s
James Leach
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Carnegie Mellon University
Training the Brain in Twentieth Century America
Yu Li
Assistant Professor
Loyola Marymount University
The Chop Suey Typeface, Authenticity, and Agency: Visual Representations of Chineseness by American Businesses
Cynthia Meyers
Professor Emeritus, Communication, Art and Media
College of Mount Saint Vincent
Sell-e-vision: Madison Avenue and Television in the 1950s and 1960s
Ulysses Pascal
Ph.D. Candidate
UCLA
Circuits of Finance: NASDAQ and the Making of the Global Market
Lauren Pearlman
Associate Professor
University of Florida
The Security State: The Rise of Private Security Industries in Post-World War II America
Juanjuan Peng
Associate Professor, History
Georgia Southern University
From the Japanese Occupation to the Communist Liberation: The Transformation of Dupont Business in China in the Late 1940s and Early 1950s
Richard Popp
Associate Professor, History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Television's Metropolis: TV and New York Urbanism
Steven Rodriguez
Ph.D. Candidate
Vanderbilt University
Imaging Hemispheric Solidarity: The United States, Cuba, and Pan-American International Education
Alyssa Russell
Ph.D. Candidate
Duke University
Economic Development at What Cost? The Fantus Company, Financial Subsidies, and Working Class Communities, 1919-1999
Maya Shenoy
Master's Candidate
University of Chicago
Close Ties, Vague Trust: Building Social Institutions to Establish Corporate Dominance in Delaware
Eric Spenk
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Texas at Arlington
Gaming the Cold War: Video Games and the Reification of American Militarism and Culture
Alicia Svenson
Ph.D. Candidate
Northeastern University
"The Need for Honest Material": Reactions to Concrete within the Stone and Brick Industries, 1900-1960
H. B. du Pont Fellowship
Thomas Castillo
Associate Professor, History
Coastal Carolina University
Freedom to Work: The Contested History of the Right to Work
Ella Coon
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Columbia University
Control Data: Producing American Power and High-Technology, 1957-1992
David Correia
Professor, American Studies
University of New Mexico
Set the Earth on Fire: Coal Mining, Policing, Climate Change, and the Strike that Changed the World
Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden
Associate Professor, Music History
University of North Texas
Music and the du Pont Women's Community
Ai Hisano
Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Information Studies
University of Tokyo
Aesthetic Capitalism: Creating Modern Sensations
Benjamin Kletzer
Ph.D. Candidate, Modern Chinese History
University of California-San Diego
China's Dream of the Red Railway: Professional Railroaders and the Making of an Industrial Power, 1945-1976
Paul Lerner
Professor, History
University of Southern California
Exiles on Main Street: Central European Émigrés, American Households, and Cold War Capitalism, 1940-1970
Elizabeth Moore
CUNY Graduate Center, NYC History
Long Island Railroad Political History
Kevin Moskowitz
Ph.D. Candidate, Transatlantic History
University of Texas at Arlington
Midwest Muscle: The Rise of North American Automobile Manufacturing, 1910-1960s
Eric Reed
Professor, History
Western Kentucky University
Bourbon: A Global Cultural History
Boyd Ruamcharoen
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Anthropology, and Science
MIT
The Decomposing Message: Media Technologies, Tropical Climate and the United States in the World
Yijun Sun
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Communication
University of Massachusetts
From the Geissler Tube to the Age of Telecommunication: A Media Archaeology of Vacuum Tubes, 1857-1947
2021
Long-Term Fellows
Salem Elzway (Louis Galambos National Fellowship in Business and Politics, 9 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, University of Michigan
“Arms of the State: A History of the Industrial Robot in Postwar America.”
Salem Elzway is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Michigan, where his research focuses on STS (science, technology, & society) and political economy in the twentieth-century United States.
Dylan Gottlieb (NEH-Hagley Fellowship on Business, Culture, and Society, 4 months)
Lecturer in History, Princeton University
Wall Street & the Remaking of New York
Dylan Gottlieb is a historian of the United States specializing in cities and capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a lecturer at Princeton University. His book project, Yuppies: Wall Street & the Remaking of New York, under contract with Harvard University Press, examines how “young, urban professionals” wielded the cutting edge of financialization in American life.
Ivana Žimbrek (H. B. du Pont Dissertation Fellowship, three months)
Ph.D. Candidate
Central European University, Vienna
Freedom vs. Communism? Trajectories of Encounters and Exchange in Retail between US and Yugoslavia, 1950s-1980s
Short Term Fellows
Peter Astras
Ph.D. Candidate
St. John's University
"You think you know what nature is": The Literary and Historical Ecology of Lake Hopatcong
Emily Baker
Lecturer, Fine Arts
Rowan University
Nylon 66
Jason Barr
Professor
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
John J. Raskob and the Economics of the Empire State Building
Tracy Barnett
Ph.D. Candidate
Univerity of Georgia
"Men and Their Guns": The Culture of Self-Deputized Manhood in the South, 1850-1877
Clark Barwick
Senior Lecturer
Indiana University
American Coffee: Peter Schlumbohm and Chemex Coffee Maker
Jason Black
Professor
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Representations of U.S. and Canadian Masculinity in 20th Century Seagram Advertisements
Barrie Blatchford
Ph.D. Candidate
Columbia University
Fashion Victims: An Environmental History of the American Fur Industry, 1870-2006
Bre Anne Brisley
Ph.D. Candidate
Indiana University
Examining Ernest Dichter's International Correspondence
Briceno Bowrey
Ph.D. Candidate
Univerity of Maryland, College Park
Biomedical Research at RCA, 1960-1990
R. Claire Bunschoten
Ph.D. Candidate
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
From Ice Cream to Vanilla Ice: Vanilla's Many Permutations and Meanings in the Long Twentieth Century
Ann Charles
Masters Candidate
Goucher College
The Five-Star: Eventing and Event Planning During a Pandemic
Hanul Choe
Master's Candidate
The University of Georgia
Distant Management: American Political Development at the Panama Canal, 1904-14
Peter Christensen
Associate Professor
University of Rochester
The Architectural Patent
Graham Clure
Post Doctoral Fellow
University of Lausanne
Enlightenment Agrarian Republics: From Vaud to Poland and America
David Correia
Professor, American Studies
University of New Mexico
The 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike and the Origins of Police
Beth DeFrancis Sun
Research and Reference Librarian
Georgetown University
The "X" Trade Patents: Rediscovering America's Lost Inventions
Sean Delehanty
Ph.D. Candidate
The John Hopkins University
The Shareholder Value Revolution
Casey Eilbert
Ph.D. Candidate
Princeton University
Bureaucracy: A Keyword in American Political History
Megan Elias
Associate Professor, History
Boston University
Be His Guest; How Conrad Hilton Made Hotels Better Than Home
Bryant Etheridge
Visiting Lecturer
Bridgewater State University
The Tragedy of Taft-Hartley: Interunion Rivalry, New Deal Labor, and the Emergence of Post-War Conservatism
Michael Fischer
Ph.D. Candidate
Temple University
Nonstate Actors, the Wilson Administration, and the Russian Revolution
Cory Fischer-Hoffman
Visiting Assistant Professor
Lafayette College
Unearthing the Global Division of Labor: Bethlehem Steel's Latin American Mines
Gerard Fitzgerald
Visiting Scholar
George Mason University
The Nature of War: An Evironmental History of Industrialization in the United States During World War I
Sophie FitzMaurice
Ph.D. Candidate, History
UC Berkeley
Grounded Wires: An Enivironmental History of the U.S. Telegraph, c 1844-1925
Alexander Fleet
Ph.D. Candidate
Wayne State University
Company Unions and Worker Identity
Amanda White Gibson
Independent scholar, History
Credit is Due: African-Americans as Borrowers and Lenders in Antebellum Virginia
Emily Godbey
Associate Professor, History
Iowa State University
Regarding Explosions: Images of Disaster in the Hagley Museum & Library
Jeremy Goodwin
Ph.D. Candidate
Cornell University
Entrepreneurs and Job Creators: The Neoliberal Politics of American Small Business in 1970s and 1980s
Youn Ki
Research Professor
Seoul National University
Employers' Political Mobilization of Workers in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s
Benjamin Kletzer
Ph.D. Candidate
University of California-San Diego
China's Dream of the Red Railway: Professional Railroaders and the Making of an Industrial Power, 1945-1976
Suzy Kopf
Independent Scholar
Unpeeling the Orange Empire: The Lasting Impact of Sunkist's Advertising in the Twentieth Century
Benjamin Leavitt
Ph.D. Candidate
Baylor University
Partners in Design: The Architectural History of Grove City College
Alexander Liebman
Ph.D. Candidate
Rutgers University
Algoecological Farming: Prehistories of Agriculture's Digital Turn
Alexandra Macdonald
Ph. D. Candidate, History
The College of William and Mary
The Social Life of Time on the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1660-1830
William Angus McLeod IV
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Pennsylvania
"Industry on Parade": The Business Community and Vocational Education, 1940-1990
Kelsey McNiff
Associate Professor
Endicott College
"Eight people of some talent, with so much virtue": A Portrait of the du Pont Family at their Arrival in the United States
Kevin Moskowitz
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Texas at Arlington
Detroit Muscle: Automobile Manufacturing and the Middle West, 1913-1959
Grace Ong Yan
Assistant Professor
Thomas Jefferson University
Inside the Architecture of Business, Networks & Media
Cody Patton
Ph.D. Candidate
The Ohio State University
Nature's Brew: An Environmental History of American Brewing
Charles Petersen
Post Doctoral Fellow
Cornell University
A New History of Employee Stock Options
Florencia Pierri
Ph.D. Candidate
Princeton University
Toys that Teach: Computer Games in 1960s America
Gabrielle Printz
Ph.D. Candidate, Architecture History
Yale University
Man-Made: Building the Environments for Synthetics Manufacture in Iran, 1974-79
Pablo Pryluka
Ph.D. Candidate
Princeton University
Expectations and Inequality: A History of Consumption in South America (1930s-1970s)
Brian Sarginger
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Maryland, College Park
The Shareholder Movement: Shareholder Activism and Activists in the 20th Century
Marshall Scheetz
Master Copper
Jamestown Cooperage LLC
Coopers, Cooperage, and Cask Production at E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company
Corinna Schlombs
Associate Professor
Rochester Institute of Technology
A Menial Revolution: Data Entry, Labor Identity, and Inequality in Cold War Computer Automation
Sam Schirvar
Ph.D. Candidate, History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsyvania
Military-Industrial Franchise: Electronics, Defense Contracting, and Economic Development in the Cold War United States
Julia Silverman
Ph.D. Candidate
Harvard University
"Designing a Useable Future During the Indian New Deal"
Kelli Smith-Biwer
Ph.D. Candidate, Musicology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The HiFi Man: Masculinity, Modularity, and Home Audio in the U.S. Midcentury
Chelsea Spencer
Ph.D. Candidate
MIT
The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building, ca. 1865-1930
Phoebe Springstubb
Ph.D. Candidate
MIT
Climate Knowledge, the Seasonal Worker, and the Business of Winter
Amanda Thompson
Ph. D. Candidate
Bard Graduate Center
Seminole and Micccosukee Patchwork: Craft, Sovereignty, and Settler Colonial Relations
Mark Tseng-Putterman
Ph.D. Candidate
Brown University
Transpacific Networks: Media, Infrastructure, and Ideology in America's Asia
Aaron Van Ness
Ph.D. Candidate
Harvard University
"The Restoration of What?": From The Persistence of Inexhaustibility in Fisheries Science
Emmet von Stackelberg
Ph.D. Candidate
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Seeing through Silver: A Material and Chemical History of Moving Images before WWII
Stephanie Vasko
Managing Director
Center for Interdisciplinarity , Michigan State University
Constructing, Deconstructing/Composing with Archival Materials
Derek Vouri-Richard
Ph.D. Candidate
The College of William and Mary
Corporate Semiotics: Creating US Mass Culture Pedegory, 1890-1970
Michael Wheeler
Research Engineer
SRC, Inc.
The Repeal of the Corn Laws and US Transportation Investment
Madeline Williams
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Harvard University
Typing Technological Ableism: The Disability Origins of Keyboard Writing, 1800-1915
Che Yeun
Ph.D. Candidate
Harvard University
Science and Self in the Modern Age of Smell
H.B. du Pont Fellowship
Gavin Benke
Senior Lecturer, American Studies
Boston University
Imaging the Future of Business: 1961-1994
Ann Charles
Independent scholar, Fine Arts
The Five-Star: Pandemic, Postponement, and the Perseverance in the Horse World
Robrecht Declerq
Postdoc, History
Ghent University
Saving Private Property: American Business, Economic Sovereignty and Protecting Business Assets Abroad (1950-1995)
Erin Freedman
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Science
Harvard University
Fabricating Modern Fibers: A Sensory History
Mark Markov
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Durham, UK
Wars Not Fought: Neutrality and European Navies in American Waters During the US Civil War
Christopher Rudeen
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Science
Harvard University
Treating Clothes: Dress and the Sciences of Subjectivity
Maia Silber
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Princeton University
A Day's Work: Low-Wage and Temporary Labor in Postwar America
Maureen Thompson
Ph. D. Candidate, History
Florida International University
Capitalism, Crops, and Cultural Change Through the Lens of the W. Atlee Burpee Seed Company, 1876-1915
2020
Long-Term Fellows
Regina Lee Blaszczyk (NEH-Hagley Fellow, Business History, 4 months)
Professor, History of Business and Society, University of Leeds
“Synthetics and the Senses: How DuPont and Other Fiber Marketers Revolutionized American Style and Transformed the Global Fashion System”
Blaszczyk’s project examines the artificial fibers and their impact on everyday life in the twentieth century, starting with the British and French inventors of the first man-made fibers in the late Victorian period and ending in our own global era with concerns about the impact of plastics on the environment. It explores the history of textile fibers through the experiences of the chemical companies that produced rayon, nylon, and polyester; the textile mills that generated fabrics from these miracle materials; and the designers, decorators, and architects who specified them for automobiles ,airplanes, clothing, furnishings, and interior design. The geographic emphasis is the United States with comparisons to the UK, continental Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Sven Kube (NEH-Hagley Fellow, Atlantic History, 4 months)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Florida International University
“Evolution of Deutsche Schallplatten (German Records) from a Small Private Firm into the Flagship Enterprise on the German Democratic Republic Cultural Circuit”
Kube’s project Compares the work and thought of two captains of industry on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Scrutinizing the David Sarnoff papers and select parts of the RCA collection to enable drawing comparisons between the entrepreneurial principles and managerial strategies of America’s media mogul and Harri Költzsch, the most influential company director on the German Democratic Republic’s entertainment circuit. Contributes to efforts of expanding the focus of business history beyond Western economic environments by scrutinizing similarities and differences in the responsibilities and approaches of capitalist and communist manage
Nicole Welk-Joerger (NEH-Hagley Fellow, Business, Science, and Environmental History, 4 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
“Rumen Nation: An Environmental History of Feeding Cattle in the United States”
Welk-Joerger’s project engages with historical documents and ethnographic narratives on dairy and beef farms to tell the story of the U.S. animal feed industry. Focused specifically on ruminants, the project highlights the scientific work that went into using feed as a technology to manipulate bovine guts. This manipulation affected humans, non-humans, soil, waterways, and the atmosphere, shaping the idea of “sustainability” in the U.S. which continues to anchor debates today.
Kelly Goodman (Galambos/ Hagley Library Fellow, History, 9 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Yale University
“Taxing Limits: The Political Economy of American School Finance”
Goodman’s project asks how organized people tried to change the way we fund K-12 publication education over the course of the twentieth century. “Taxing Limits” tells the political, intellectual, and fiscal history of organizations and organizers from labor and business history who shaped twentieth century American school finance.
Amanda Thompson (H. B. du Pont Dissertation Fellowship 4 months)
Ph. D. Candidate, Decorative Arts
Bard Graduate Center
Seminole and Micccosukee Patchwork: Craft, Sovereignty, and Settler Colonial Relations
Short Term Fellows
Jason Barr
Professor, Economics
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
John J. Raskob and the Economics of the Empire State Building
Tracy Barnett
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Georgia
"Men and Their Guns": The Culture of Self-Deputized Manhood in the South, 1850-1877
Clark Barwick
Senior Lecturer, Communication
Indiana University
American Coffee: Peter Schlumbohm and Chemex Coffee Maker
Briceno Bowrey
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Maryland, College Park
Biomedical Research at RCA, 1960-1990
Kevin Bunch
Independent Scholar, History
International Joint Commission, Washington DC
A History of Joe Weisbecker, FRED and the 1802 in Video Games
Hanul Choe
Master's Candidate, History
The University of Georgia
Distant Management: American Political Development at the Panama Canal, 1904-14
Patricia Curtin
Professor, Communication
University of Oregon
Working Relationships: A Labor-Centric History of the US Public Relations Profession
Casey Eilbert
Ph.D. Candidate, US History
Princeton University
Bureaucracy: A Keyword in American Political History
Bryant Etheridge
Visiting Lecturer, History
Bridgewater State University
The Tragedy of Taft-Hartley: Interunion Rivalry, New Deal Labor, and the Emergence of Post-War Conservatism
Gerard Fitzgerald
Visiting Scholar, History
George Mason University
The Nature of War: An Environmental History of Industrialization in the United States During World War I
Michael Golec
Associate Professor, Art Design
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Icons of Expertise: A History of Technical Images and Thoughtful Consumption
Jack Grobe
Ph.D. Candidate, American History
SUNY Albany
The American Campaign to Acquire German Military Technology, 1917-1929
Karen Henson
Associate Professor, Musicology
Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY
Singing Machine: Opera and Early Sound Recording
Brian Johnston
Independent Scholar, Architecture
Italian Pavilion at Expo 67: Terre des Hommes/Man and His World
Scott Kushner
Assistant Professor, Communications
University of Rhode Island
Crowd Control: Organizing Audiences around Spectacle in the Industrial Era
Joseph Larnerd
Assistant Professor, Art History
Drexel University
Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Gilded Age
Mark Markov
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Durham University
Wars Not Fought:Neutrality and European Navies in American Waters during the US Civil War
Kelsey McNiff
Associate Professor, History
Endicott College
"Eight people of some talent, with so much virtue": A Portrait of the du Pont Family at their Arrival in the United States
Clive Muir
Independent Scholar, Communication
Exploring the Technology of Watermelon Postcards
Florencia Pierri
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Science
Princeton University
Toys that Teach: Computer Games in 1960s America
Hannah Pivo
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History
Columbia University
Seeing the "Social": Data Visualization and Information Graphics in US Business, Industry, and Social Sciences
Brian Sarginger
Ph.D. Candidate, Business History
University of Maryland
The Shareholder Movement: Shareholder Activists in the Twentieth-Century
Maia Silber
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Princeton University
Work of Any Kind: Casual and Informal Labor during the Second Industrial Revolution
Ranjodh Singh
Ph.D. Candidate, English Language/Literature
University of California, Davis
Rendering: A Political Diagrammatology of Computation Project
Aaron Van Nestez
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Science
Harvard University
"The Restoration of What?": From The Persistence of Inexhaustibility in Fisheries Science
Emmet von Stackelberg
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Seeing through Silver: A Material and Chemical History of Moving Images before WWII
Michael Wheeler
Research Engineer
SRC, Inc.
The Repeal of the Corn Laws and US Transportation Investment Science and Self in the Modern Age of Smell
H. B. du Pont Fellowship
Yassin Abou El Fadil
Ph.D. Candidate, Economics
University of Göttingen
Inheritance Practices in Family Businesses--Germany and the United States in the Twentieth Century
Deirdre Evans-Pritchard
Adjunct Professor, Art History
University of Maryland, Global
RCA, Television and the Origins of Media Literacy
Alexandra Hyard
Associate Professor, Economics
Universite Lille
Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, Writings on the United States of America
Trish Kahle
Postdoctoral Fellow, History
University of Chicago
The Graveyard Shift: Energy Citizenship in the American Century
Cody Patton
Ph.D. Candidate, History
The Ohio State University
Nature's Brew: An Environmental History of American Brewing
Stefan Rabitsch
Assistant Professor, American Studies
University of Graz
A Cultural History of Western Hats
Brian Sarginger
Ph.D. Candidate, Business History
University of Maryland
The Shareholder Movement: Shareholder Activists in the Twentieth-Century
Benjamin Schneider
Ph.D. Candidate, Economics
University of Oxford
Technological Change and Work Economics
Lloyd Tomlinson
Ph.D. Candidate, History
West Virginia University
Stonega Coke & Coal Company Towns Since the New Deal
Derek Vouri-Richard
Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies
The College of William and Mary
Corporate Semiotics: Creating US Mass Culture Pedegory, 1890-1970
Emily Wells
Ph.D. Candidate, History
College of William and Mary
"Keep Within Compass": The Geographical Perspectives of American Girls, 1742-1836
Che Yeun
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Science
Harvard University
Science and Self in the Modern Age of Smell
2019
Long-Term Fellows
Li Cornfeld (NEH-Hagley Fellow, Communications, 8 months)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Amherst College
“Theater of Invention: Live Performance and Emerging Media”
Cornfeld’s project identifies acts of technological demonstration as integral to the operation of industrial capitalism and foundational to the cultural development of media and technology. Spectacular acts that we now call “tech demos” date to the beginnings of global industrialization, with world’s fairs and expositions, where industrial corporations introduced mass audiences to new media and technology through elaborate display. Contemporary analogues exist on ballroom stages of splashy tech conventions, where product unveilings staged by industry leaders stream for audiences around the world and garner breathless media coverage. More than mere technical illustrations of how to operate new devices, these presentations imbue unfamiliar technologies with cultural frames, prior to their uptake in social life. Looking across technologies and timeframes, Theater of Invention establishes technological exhibition as foundational to medial emergence, an enduring ritual that naturalizes industrial ideas about technology and shores up capitalist cultural power.
Amy Offner (NEH-Hagley Fellow, History, 4 months)
Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
“The Disappearing Worker”
Offner’s project travels across the globe to offer a transnational history of the unraveling of the employment relationship. It connects the fate of US workers to those overseas by situating them both within multinational corporations that transposed lessons and practices across world regions. The research focuses on the years after 1945, a distinctive moment when conflicts in the emergent Third World propelled processes of corporate restructuring that rippled across the globe. During the early postwar decades, US investors extended their reach overseas, finding novel opportunities for profit within the development programs of African, Asian, and Latin American nations. But they struggled with the political, social, and legal liabilities of owning property and managing workers in an age of upheaval. Third World capitalists and technical professionals jockeyed for position, labor movements challenged managerial authority, and governments asserted powers to tax, regulate, and at times nationalize firms.
Daniel Wortel-London (Galambos/Hagley Library Fellow, History, 9 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, New York University
“On What Grounds: Real Estate and the Public Costs of Metropolitan Growth in New York City, 1880-1940”
Wortel-London’s project investigates the changing relation of public finance and real estate development in New York City between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. Whereas most historians have viewed these topics in isolation, assuming that urban fiscal policy merely reflects broader social and economic forces, my research reveals that decisions over how – and by whom - urban real estate should be taxed or subsidized had independent and powerful effects on the distribution of wealth, power, and social equity within American cities. My project traces these effects by applying a “fiscal lens” to questions of local political economy in one American city. Between the 1880s and 1930s New York routinely faced bankruptcy - not as a result of macro-level trends, but of municipal subsidies for real estate speculation on the city’s core and periphery. These policies, which added to the tax and rent burdens of ordinary New Yorkers, led to widespread conflicts over how, where, and whether real estate should be publicly promoted. By 1940 these struggles had established a new public finance regime – one that systematically favored large central-city developers and underassessed white home-owners while discriminating against working-class and minority tenants. By examining the development of this system and its continuing effects on one American city, scholars can better understand how public finance decisions have subsidized the spatial, racial, and wealth inequalities that characterize American cities today – and in so doing, rethink their accounts of how the “New Urban Crisis” came to be.
Isabelle Held (Henry Belin du Pont Dissertation Fellow, History of Design, 4 months)
Ph.D .Candidate, History of Design, Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Art
“The Bombshell Assembly Line: Military-Industrial Materials and the Shaping of Women’s Bodies in the USA, 1939–1976”
Held’s project analyses the relationship between the research and development of synthetic materials for military and industrial use and modifications to women’s bodies in the US, from WWII to 1976. It explores how and why key actors in synthetic materials’ development and application, including US chemical companies, foundationwear brands and plastic surgeons, selected the female body as a site for employing new artificial materials and as a showcase for their exposition to American and international audiences. Ultimately, it seeks to understand the wider socio-political significance of synthetics and women’s bodies in wartime and post-war US, and to use this knowledge to generate critical questions and perspectives for material research with corporeal applications today.
Short Term Fellows
Norwood Andrews
Independent Scholar
Musical Performance in Bracero Railroad Communities
Megan Armknecht
Ph. D. Candidate, History
Princeton University
Diplomatic Households and the Foundations of US Diplomacy, 1789-1870
Roger Bailey
Ph. D. Candidate, History
University of Maryland, College Park
A Crisis of Identity: Sectionalism and the US Navy Officer Corps, 1815-1861
Colleen Boggs
Professor, English
Dartmouth College
Playing with My Food: Experimental Writing and the Invention of Modern Taste
Flavia Canestrini
Ph. D. Candidate, History
Sciences Po, Paris /Northwestern University
How economic sanctions changed American foreign policy. A political, economic and cultural history of embargoes between 1981 and 1989
Gregory Cartelli
Ph. D. Candidate, Architecture
Princeton University
Narratives surrounding the 1948 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art of the Thomas Lamb Wedge Lock Handle
Chloe Chapin
Ph. D. Candidate, American Studies
Harvard University
The False Universal of Nineteenth-Century Formal Attire: Uniformity, Masculinity, and Power, 1820-1850
Bill Cooke
Professor, Education
University of York
National Association of Manufacturers and the Anglo-American Productivity Committee as the Legacy of Stafford Cripps
Daniel Cumming
Ph. D. Candidate, History
New York University
Health is Wealth: The Rise of a Medical Metropolis and the Remaking of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century Baltimore
Salem Elzway
Ph. D. Candidate, History
University of Michigan
The Arm Race: A History of the Industrial Robot in Postwar America (working title)
Mary Fesak
Ph. D. Candidate, Philosophy
University of Delaware
Marion du Pont Scott Thoroughbred Racing
Keiji Fujimura
Ph. D. Candidate, Language & Culture
Osaka University
Regulation as Competitive Advantage: A Case Study on Regulatory Differences Contributing to International Competitive Advantage of Japanese Automakers in the US Auto Market
Danielle Giffort
Assistant Professor, Sociology
St. Louis College of Pharmacy
Wet Women and the Marijuana Mamas: Gender and Movements to Reform Alcohol and Drug Policies in the United States
Robert Gordon-Fogelson
Ph. D. Candidate, Art History
University of Southern California
Total Integration: Design, Business, and Society in the United States, 1935-1975
Anthony Grasso
Assistant Professor, American Politics
U.S. Military Academy
Privilege and Punishment: Class, Crime, and the Development of the American State
Alexandra Hyard
Associate Professor, Economics
University of Lille
Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Political and Constitutional Writings
Louisa Iarocci
Associate Professor, Architecture
University of Washington, Seattle
Bin, Bag, Box: The Architecture of Convenience
Conrad Jacober
Ph. D. Candidate, Sociology
The Johns Hopkins University
Bringing the Banks Back In: American Commercial Banks and the Origins of Financialization
Trish Kahle
Postdoctoral Fellow, History
University of Chicago
The Graveyard Shift: Coal and Citizenship in an Age of Energy Crisis
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler
Assistant Professor, Design History
Purdue University
Open Plan: A History of the American Office
Connor Kenaston
Ph. D. Candidate, History
University of Virginia
Church of the Air: Mainwave Religion and the Sanctification of Communications Capitalism
Malwina Lys-Dobradin
Ph. D. Candidate, Architecture
Columbia University
The Historical Trajectory of "Free Enterprise"
Angelica Maier
Ph. D. Candidate, Art History
University of Minnesota
Toxic Matter: American Sculpture, Materials Science, and Cultural Fear, 1962-1979
Margaret Manchester
Associate Professor, History
Providence College
The Corporate Cold War
Zachary Mann
Ph. D. Candidate, English
University of Southern California
The Punch Card Imagination: Authorship and Early Computing History
James McElroy
Ph. D. Candidate, History
University of Minnesota
Racial Segmentation and Market Segregation: The Late Twentieth-Century History of the American City Supermarket, 1960-1990
Colette Perold
Ph. D. Candidate, Communications
New York University
The Empire of Informatics: IBM in Brazil before Modern Computing
Brian Sarginger
Ph. D. Candidate, Business History
University of Maryland
The Shareholder Movement: Shareholder Activists and Activism in the Twentieth-Century
Benjamin Schneider
Ph. D. Candidate, Economics
University of Oxford
Technological Change and Living Standards
Melanie Sheehan
Ph. D. Candidate, History
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
International Labor Organization and the Politics of Global Economic Transformation, 1945-1995
Vaibhav Singh
Postdoctoral Fellow, Communications
University of Reading
The Elusive Writing Machine: The Typewriter in India
Margaret Stack
Ph. D. Candidate, History
University of Connecticut
Paragons and Pariahs: National Identity, Masculinity, and Misbehavior in Representation of American Naval Sailors and Officers
Elliott Sturtevant
Ph. D. Candidate, Architecture
Columbia University
Empire’s Stores: Entrepôt Urbanism in America, 1846-1947
Aya Tanaka
Adjunct Professor, French History
NYU-Stern
Physiocracy and DuPont's Industrial Development
Kevin Daniel Tennent
Lecturer, Management
University of York
Exploring American Industrial Democracy, 1913-1935
Daniel Traficonte
Ph. D. Candidate, Urban Studies
MIT
Why does the United States federal government practice R&D-oriented industrial policy, and why does federal industrial policy take the form that it does?
Hanna Vikström
Postdoctoral Researcher, Religious Studies
Umeå University
Tales and traces of teeth. Connecting bodies and resource flows..
Andrew Wasserman
Visiting Assistant Professor, Art History
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
The Public Art of Public Relations: Creating the New American City
Sydney Watts
Associate Professor, History
University of Richmond
Domestic Servants and Dependents in the du Pont and Manigault Households during the Revolutionary Era, 1770-1830
Sara Wermiel
Independent Researcher, Technology
MIT
Railroad Contractors and the Rise of General Contractors for Buildings
Madeline Williams
Ph. D. Candidate, History
Harvard University
Unseen History: The Politics of Blindness and Disability in the Twentieth-Century United States
Sunny Xiang
Assistant Professor, English
Yale University
The Transpacific Middle
2018
Long-Term Fellows
John Patrick Leary (NEH-Hagley Fellow, English, 4 months)
Associate Professor of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
“A Counterhistory of Innovation”
Leary’s project explores the cultural and intellectual history of innovation. With roots as a synonym for false prophesy and rebellion in the 17th century, the term has today become the contemporary ideal of worldly success, associated with all that is novel and creative. Aimed at a wide audience, this book project brings a skeptical eye to the popular myth in the media, examining innovation not only as an economic process of a product, but as a very old idea with a tangled and surprising history. At Hagley, Leary will complete research for three chapters and continue writing two others already in progress.
Karen W. Mahar (NEH-Hagley Fellow, History, 4 months)
Professor of History, Siena College, Loudonville, NY
“Corner Office: The Creation of the American Corporate Elite,”
Mahar’s project explores episodes in American corporate history between 1880 and 1980 to reveal how white masculinity was baked into impressions of executive competence, and how the white masculinity of business executives operated as an intangible asset for corporations and for executives as a class. It explores how the meaning of white, male business leadership developed and changed over the twentieth century, and how gender was deliberately used to legitimate an executive class. During the fellowship tenure, Mahar will conduct new research in Hagley collections, review and supplement existing Hagley research, and write several chapters of the book manuscript.
Sean Vanatta (NEH-Hagley Fellow, History, 4 months)
Quin Morton Teaching Fellow, Writing Program, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
“Making Credit Convenient: Credit Cards and the Political Economy of Modern America”
Vanatta’s project asks why credit cards became so central to modern economic life. Tracing the history of credit networks and the forces that shaped them from the 1950s to the present, the manuscript shows how firms manipulated the U.S. system of federal sovereignty to foreclose democratic accountability in state-regulated financial markets and give rise to unrestrained consumer credit. Vanatta will use the fellowship tenure to plot a revision strategy for the manuscript, and to complete drafting and revising a coauthored book, The Banker’s Thumb: The Institutional and Evolutionary History of Bank Supervision in the U.S. (with Peter Conti-Brown).
A.J. Murphy (Jefferson Scholars/Hagley Library Fellow, History, 9 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Columbia University
“Business Management Expertise in the Cold War U.S. Military”
Murphy’s dissertation explores how defense leaders in the second half of the twentieth century patterned the administration of the military on profit-seeking firms, setting up controls and incentives that were supposed to make the military’s internal operations conform to idealized market principles.
Short-Term Fellows
Yassin Abou El Fadil
Lecturer, History
University of Göttingen
The Comparison of Inheritance Practices in Family Business - Germany and the United States in the Second Half of the Twentieth-Century
Teal Arcadi
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Princeton University
Remapping America: Power, Poverty, and the Interstate Highway System in the Postwar United States
Kashia Arnold
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of California, Santa Barbara
Trans-Pacific Values: The United States and the Regional Economy of the Pacific, 1900-1937
Elizabeth Badger
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Minnesota
Labor, Consumption, and Gender in Video Game Culture, 1970-1994
Roger Bailey
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Maryland
A Crisis of Identity: Sectionalism and the US Navy Officer Corps, 1815-1861
Victoria Barnes
Lecturer, European Legal
Max Planck Institute for European Legal History
Shareholder Voice And Company Law In Great Britain, The United States, and Canada
Molly Beer
Lecturer, English
University of Michigan
Angelica: A Biography
Gavin Benke
Lecturer, Business History
Boston University
Imagining the Future of Business, 1970–2000
Jacqueline Brandon
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Princeton University
Free Trade: NAFTA and the Politics of Post-Cold War America
Thomas Buckley
Lecturer, International Business
University of Sheffield
The Performance of Mass Distributors in the United States and thevUnited Kingdom, 1945-1985
Thomas Castillo
Assistant Professor, History
Coastal Carolina University
The Right to Work: Class Struggle in Magic City Miami, 1914-1946
Daniel Cumming
Ph.D. Candidate, History
New York University
History of Health Inequality in Twentieth-Century Baltimore
Keiji Fujimira
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Osaka University
Regulation as Competitive Advantage: A Case Study on Regulatory Differences Contributing to International Competitive Advantage of Japanese Autoworkers in the US Auto Market
Andrew Gawthorpe
Lecturer, History
Leiden University
Trade Liberalization and its Critics in the United States since 1934
Kelly Goodman
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Yale University
Taxing Limits: The Political Economy of American School Finance
Robert Gordon-Fogelson
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History
University of Southern California
Total Integration: Design, Business, and Society in the United States, 1935-1975
Ryan Issa Haddad
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Maryland
America's Commercial Cold War: Trade, National Security, and the Western Alliance
Matthew Hollow
Lecturer, Business
York University
The Business of Business Histories: Organizational Anniversaries and the Process of Remembering in Historical Context
John Jackson
Lecturer, History
College of William and Mary
The Great Businesses and the Clever Bigots: Bridging the Respectable Right and the Antisemitic Right
Anastasia Klimchynskaya
Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literature
University of Pennsylvania
Science Fiction and the Making of Modernity
Brenton J. Malin
Associate Professor, Communication
University of Pittsburgh
Ordinary and Necessary: A History of the American Tax Deduction for Advertising
Andrew Meade McGee
Postdoctoral Fellow, History of Science
Kluge Center, Library of Congress
Litigating the Computer: How Federal Courts Engineered the Digital Age
Alex McPhee-Browne
Independent Scholar, History
Evangelists for Freedom: Libertarian Populism and the Intellectual Origins of Modern American Conservatism
Amy Offner
Assistant Professor, History
University of Pennsylvania
The Disappearing Worker
Colette Perold
Ph.D. Candidate, Communications
New York University
The Empire of Informatics: IBM in Brazil before Computation
Sarah Pickman
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Yale University
The Right Stuff: Objects and the Making of Extreme Environments, 1820-1950
Jamie Pietruska
Assistant Professor, History
Rutgers University
Detective Paperwork in the Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century United States
Aaron Shkuda
Lecturer, History
Princeton University
Building for the Securities and Commodities Industries, 1960-1990
Jonathan Singerton
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Edinburgh
Beginning Her World Anew: Maria van Born (1766-1830)
J Alexandra Straub
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Temple University
Making Pure Water: A History of Water Conditioning from Potash to Calgon
Jason Tercha
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Binghamton University
Networking Rural American Landscapes: Rural Perspectives on the Construction and Management of Internal Improvements in the Early American Republic
Roger Turner
Research Fellow, History of Science
Science History Institute
Meteoroloigcal Vision and Weather Blindness
Liana Vardi
Professor, History
State University of New York at Buffalo
Du Pont de Nemours and the Directory
Mark Westmoreland
Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy
Villanova University
On the Genealogy of the Concept of Race
Brandon Kirk Williams
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of California, Berkeley
Globalizing Productivity, Embedding Inequality: Exporting American Political Economy to Postcolonial India and Indonesia
Kyle Williams
Ph.D. Candidate
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Between Public Good and Private Profit:The History of Corporate Social Responsibility
Bess Williamson
Associate Professor, Design History
School of Art Institute of Chicago
Designing for Others
2017
Long-Term Fellows
Jennifer A. Greenhill (NEH-Hagley Fellow, Art History, 8 months)
Associate Professor, Department of Art History, University of Southern California
“The Commercial Imagination: American Illustration and the Materialities of the Market, 1890–1930”
Greenhill’s project shows how illustrators helped establish the workings of commercial imagery in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century in four places: on the page, in the magazine, at the office, and on the road. Dr. Greenhill delved into Hagley’s extensive collection of 19th- and 20th-century advertising literature, handbooks, and periodicals, as well as corporate advertising records, company magazines, and marketing studies, to understand how businesses and illustrators worked together to create imagery promoting commercial products.
Seth R. Lunine (NEH-Hagley Fellow, Geography, 4 months)
Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley
“Breakthrough Technology: California Dynamite and the Creation of the U.S. High Explosives Industry, 1865–1895”
Lunine’s project explores how the high explosives industry supported California’s regional development, and how California companies and environments in turn shaped the industry at the national level. Dr. Lunine consulted Du Pont company records to understand the economic geography of explosives, and the place of California labor, landscapes, and industrial practices in the development of technologies that physically reshaped the American environment in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Jessica Levy (Jefferson Scholars/Hagley Library Fellow, History, 9 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, The Johns Hopkins University
“From Black Power to Black Empowerment: American Business and the Return of Racial Uplift in the United States and Africa, 1964–1994”
Levy’s dissertation explores the transnational rise of black empowerment during the late twentieth century. It illuminates the intellectual and financial investments made by American businesspeople, government bureaucrats, and civil rights leaders in transforming black dissidents into “productive citizens” in both the economic and civic senses. During the late twentieth century, black entrepreneurs performed critical work disseminating and translating free market principles to Africans and their descendants throughout the diaspora. Drawing on corporate and “movement” archives, the dissertation elucidates the ways black entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility became linked to post-Jim Crow/post-Apartheid notions of citizenship. By decentering state violence and prioritizing private capital, it explains black power’s demise in a way that reveals the seeds of political conservatism that blossomed within the global black freedom struggle.
Andrew Lea (Henry Belin du Pont Dissertation Fellow, History of Science, 4 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Oxford University
“Computerizing Diagnosis: Minds, Medicine, and Machines in Twentieth-Century America”
Lea’s dissertation examines early efforts to computerize medical diagnosis and decision making (1950s– 1980s). It approaches this larger topic through five case studies. Each of these cases is historically significant in its own right, representing early and widely discussed efforts to computerize medical diagnosis and decision making. But equally important for the purposes of this dissertation is the fact that the aims, strategies, and contexts of these cases differed in analytically interesting ways. The makers of these systems and programs held wildly divergent views about how physicians think, what kinds of medical knowledge are most diagnostically meaningful, the appropriate role of the patient and paramedical personnel in the clinical encounter, the nature and limits of computer technologies, and even how the medical system ought to be organized. This dissertation seeks to track how computing technologies both shaped and were shaped by these social, cultural, and epistemological assumptions.
Short-Term Fellows
Ellen Avitts
Associate Professor, Art History
Central Washington University
Influence of World Fairs on Marketing Techniques
Roger Bailey
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Maryland
A Crisis of Identity: Sectionalism and the US Navy Officer Corps, 1815-1861
Vyta Baselice
Ph.D. Candidate, History
George Washington University
Production of Concrete and Dissemination across the American Landscape
Oren Bracha
Professor, Law
University of Texas School of Law
Development of Brands and Trademarks
Karin Bugow
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Jacobs University Bremen
The Role of Multinational Corporations in the Green Revolution (1960s and 1970s)
Rachel Bunker
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Rutgers University
An Invisible Empire: British and American Insurance Companies and Actuarial Science in the Caribbean, 1890-1960
Bernie Carlson
Professor, Engineering & Society
University of Virginia
William C.Durant and the Rise of General Motors
Todd Carmody
Postdoctoral Fellow, English
Rutgers University
From Report to Essay: Corporate Communication and the Rise of Literary Studies
Gerardo Con Diaz
Assistant Professor, Science & Technology Studies
University of California, Davis
Antitrust and Patent Law at IBM
Marcel Deperne
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of La Rochelle
Atlantic Networks in the Ohio River Valley: French Merchants from Pittsburgh (PA) to Henderson (KY) 1789-1848
Mary Fesak
M.A. Candidate, Historic Preservation
Clemson University
Study of Equine Landscapes for Vernacular Patterns and Social Hierarchical Order of Space
Alexi Garrett
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Virginia
The Female Roots of America's Economic Power: Femme Sole Businesswomen of the Early Republic, 1774-1828
Reed Gochberg
Postdoctoral Fellow, Literature
Amherst College
Novel Objects: Museums and Scientific Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Kelly Goodman
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Yale University
Taxing Limits: The Political Economy of American School Finance
Mark Hauser
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Carnegie Mellon University
All the Comforts of Hell: Doughboys and American Mass Culture, 1916-1921
Isabelle Held
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History
Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum
The Bombshell Assembly Line: Military-Industrial Materials Research and the Syntheticisation of Women's Bodies in the USA, 1939-present
Clifton Hood
Professor, History
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Business Encounters with Imposters
Mallory Huard
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Pennsylvania State University
Intersection of Conservation Efforts and Elite Outdoor Leisure Activities, late Nineteenth-Century through 1970s
Alexandra Hyard
Associate Professor, History
University of Lille
The Politics of Physiocratic Movement
Ella Klik
Ph.D. Candidate, Media Studies
New York University
Erasable Media: A Media Archaeology from Letters to Bits
Volodymyr Kulikov
Postdoctoral Fellow, History
Woodrow Wilson Center/DC
Changing the Color of the Collar: Labor Communities in Company Towns
Andrew Lea
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Science & Medicine
Oxford University
Computerizing Diagnosis: Minds, Medicine, and Machines in Twentieth-Century America
Hereward Longley
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Alberta
Synthetic Oil. Energy Networks, and the Political Economy of Environmental Change in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region, 1958-2015
Christopher McKee
Professor, History
Grinnell College
Admiral Samuel F. du Pont's Cruise of the United States Frigate Congress to Hawaii and California, 1845-1849
Zachary Nowak
Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies
Harvard University
The American Train Station: A History
Joseph Pfender
Ph.D. Candidate, Musicology
New York University
Magnetic Tape Technology through its Inscription in Musical and Intermedial Artistic Practices of the 1950s
Danya Pilgrim
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Yale University
Gastronomic Alchemy: How Black Philadelphia Caterers Transformed Taste into Capital, 1790-1925
Marika Plater
Ph.D. Candidate. History
Rutgers University
Escaping New York: Working-Class Landscapes of Leisure in and around Manhattan, 1830-1920
Aya Tanaka
Independent Scholar, Literature
P.S. du Pont de Nemours Original Business Plan to Raise Funds for an American Enterprise
Emily Twarog
Assistant Professor, History
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
‘A Golden Apple Filled with Acid': Class and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1940s
Danielle Ward-Griffin
Assistant Professor, History
Christopher Newport University
Cold War Opera: David Sarnoff, Maria Golovin, and the Brussels World Fair
Anne-Katrin Weber
Junior Lecturer, Cinema Studies
University of Lausanne
A Media Archaeology of Drones: Television, the Militiary, and RCA, 1930s-1940s
Charles Whitham
Senior Lecturer, English
Edge Hill University
Corporate Conservatives Go to War: The NAM and the USCC during World War II
Laurie Wood
Assistant Professor, History
Florida State University
Risks & Realities
Thomas W. Zeiler
Professor, History
University of Colorado Boulder
Capitalist Peace and Business in the Free-Trade Order, 1933-1993
2016
Long-Term Fellows
Jeannette Alden Estruth (Miller Center/Hagley Fellow, History, 9 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, New York University
“A Political History of the Silicon Valley: Structural Change, Urban Transformation, and Local Social Movements, 1945–1995”
Estruth’s dissertation interrogates the relationships between the politics of urban development, labor organizing, and democratic inclusion to understand how the technology industry became synonymous with California’s South Bay Area in the postwar period. Drawing from a wide variety of underused archival sources—the corporate papers of semiconductor firms, oral histories with local activists, internal memos of neighborhood environmental organizations, union newspapers, and photographical documentation—the dissertation argues that debates over land use, race, gender, labor, and the urban environment shaped the technology sector’s growth in the South Bay Area in the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, these debates prompted new understandings of the role of technology in the politics and everyday life of globalizing California into the 1990s.
Jameson Karns (Henry Belin du Pont Dissertation Fellow, History, 4 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of California, Berkeley
“Military Policy and the American Civilian”
Karns’s dissertation explores the evolution of state militias into the National Guard in 19th century America. In the context of the Constitutional Architects, the militia was made up of “civilian soldiers” and each state of the Republic was granted the right to maintain such units. The writing of General Emory Upton, who prescribed that the age of industrialization required a professionalized army, would challenge this concept. In his text The Military Policy of the United States, Emory Upton would charter the United States Military into its role as a world power. The dissertation will build from an exploration the original draft of the Military Policy in Hagley’s archives to further explore Upton’s concept of “professionalized soldier” and what he felt was the antiquated concept of “citizen soldier” and, with that, the changing role of the militia/National Guard in the 19th century.
Nicole Mahoney (Henry Belin du Pont Dissertation Fellow, History, 4 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of Maryland, College Park
“Liberty, Gentility, and Dangerous Liaisons: French Culture and Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century America”
Mahoney’s dissertation argues that elite eighteenth-century Americans eagerly embraced and imitated aristocratic French culture and aesthetics to assert their claims to social and political legitimacy in a New World of vast insecurities and undecided character. Not content to be passive consumers of British goods on the fringes of empire, many Americans used the values and vestiges of French courtly culture to proclaim that they were instead dynamic cosmopolitan actors capable of competing in transatlantic communication, economic, and intellectual networks. Tokens of British polite society could be found scattered throughout all levels of the nascent American society, but it was the highly complex standards of etiquette, performance, and exquisite pleasure of French gentility that more acutely discriminated between members of high society and the middling ranks. The intricacy of French courtly culture raised standards and expectations of polite society out of the reach of ordinary Americans and distinguished a permanent American elite on the world stage.
Short-Term Fellows
Julia Abramson
Associate Professor, French Studies
University of Oklahoma
Finance and Culture: Perspectives from Enlightenment France
Philip D. Byers
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Notre Dame
Understanding of Philantrophy in Twentieth-Century America
Marion Casey
Assistant Professor, History
New York University
The Irish Image in American Popular Culture
Steven Conn
Professor, History
Miami University
The Education of Business
Jonathan Coopersmith
Professor, History
Texas A&M University
Creative Construction: The Importance of Fraud and Froth in Emerging Technologies
Taylor A. Currie
Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies
Queen's University
As American as Apple Pie: DuPont Public Relation Campaigns as Dominant Cultural Order in Twentieth- Century America
Jonathan Dentler
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Southern California
Picture Telegraphy and the Globalization of Sight, 1925-1940
Spring Greeney
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Line Dry: An Environmental History of Doing the Wash, 1845-1992
Alexandra Hyard
Associate Professor, History
University of Lille
Politics of Physiocracy
David Jones
Ph.D. Candidate, History
York University
Our Common Colonial Dependence: Making Postcolonial States in Argentina and the US until 1828
Andrew Jungclaus
Ph.D. Candidate, Religious Studies
Columbia University
True Philantropy: A Study of the Birth of the Modern Non-Profit Foundation
Jameson Karns
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Science
University of California, Berkeley
A Citizen and a Soldier: The Birth of the Federalized Militia
Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler
Assistant Professor, Art History
Columbus College of Art & Design
American Open Plan Office
David Kinkela
Associate Professor, History
SUNY Fredonia
Making Islands of Plastic: A History of Waste, Water, and Petrochemicals
Davor Mondom
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Syracuse
Apostles for Capitalism: Amway, Movement Conservatism, and the Remaking of the American Economy, 1959-2009
Kevin Murphy
Professor, Art History
Vanderbilt University
Women in Modern Architecture: The Homsey Architects, Inc. Archives
Nicholas Osborne
Lecturer, History
Ohio University
Little Capitalists: The Social Economy of Savings in the United States
Ana Maria Otero-Cleves
Assistant Professor, History
Universidad de los Andes
Pioneers of the Latin American Trade: Selling Pills, Toiletries, and Foreign Patent Medicines to the Colombian Market, 1850-1920
Victoria Pass
Assistant Professor, Art History
Salisbury University
Primary Sources in the History of Fashion Culture: A Reader
Laura Perry
Ph.D. Candidate, Literary Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Animal Surfaces and Containment in Sylvia Plath
Joseph W. Pfender
Ph.D. Candidate, Musicology
New York University
Abundant Emergence in New York Tape Music, 1947-1960
Jesús Ruiz
Ph.D. Candidate, Latin American Studies
Tulane University
Subjects of the King: Bourbon Royalism and the Origins of the Haitian Revolution, 1763-1804
Andrew T. Simpson
Assistant Professor, History
Duquesne University
Old Money: The Transformation of Aging in the Postwar United States
Kara Swanson
Professor, Law
Northeastern University
A Passion for Patents: Inventiveness, Citizenship and American Nationhood
Paul Taillon
Senior Lecturer, History
University of Auckland
Railroad Labor Relations, Labor Movement Activism, and Railroad Labor Policy in the US from World War I through the 1920s
Aya Tanaka
Independent Scholar, French Literature
P.S. du Pont de Nemours Original Business Plan to Raise Funds for an American Enterprise
Ryan Driskell Tate
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Rutgers University
America's Persian Gulf: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the American West
Sebastian Teupe
Professor, History
The Transformation of Money: A History of "Money Illusion" in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States during the Gold Standard Era
Jacques Vest
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Michigan
Vox Machinae: Phonographs and the Birth of Sonic Modernity, 1877-1929
Nicole Welk-Joerger
Ph.D. Candidate, STS
University of Pennsylvania
Feeding Others to Feed Ourselves: The Politics of Health between Humans and their Food Animals, 1896-1996
Philip Wight
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Brandeis University
Refueling the Dream: The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and the Quest for American Energy Independence
Jeff Yastine
Independent Scholar, Journalism
Familial Interactions of the Extended Sperry Family
2015
Long-Term Fellows
Jonathon Free (Miller Center/Hagley Library Fellow, History, 9 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Duke University
“Redistributing Risk: The Political Ecology of Coal in Late Twentieth-Century Appalachia”
My dissertation makes sense of the changing culture of coal communities by examining the transformation of the coal industry during the tumultuous years between the late 1960s and early 1980s. During that period, the burgeoning environmental movement and a series of highly publicized mine disasters helped sour public opinion of coal, leading Congress to pass eight new laws that sought to mitigate its human consts between 1969 and 1977. Meanwhile, hundreds of miners participated in a wave of wildcat strikes that culminated in the longest coal strike in U.S. history during 1977–78. Simultaneously, industry leaders lobbied to argue that, in light of the 1973 oil crisis, coal was the U.S.’s best choice for a cheap, dependable, domestic energy source.
Coal companies invested in surface mines, which were not only safer for miners but required fewer workers. The mining jobs that remained became more precious, as did the few mountains left untouched by surface mining. I explain both the redistribution of the risks of coal mining and its resulting divisiveness as the result of this particular moment in the history of American capitalism.
A.J. Murphy (Henry Belin du Pont Dissertation Fellow, History, 4 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Columbia University
“How Management Expertise Changed the U.S. Defense Establishment, 1953–1991”
This dissertation examines how defense officials in the Cold War period applied business management expertise in the military. Recognizing the new permanence of the expanded national security state after the Korean War, defense leaders turned to the private sector for insight in how to manage it more efficiently.
Their reforms included making some military activities operate off of their own revenues, setting up “buyer- seller” and competitive relationships between units in production and supply, designing incentives to attract a labor force in the absence of conscription, and outsourcing not just the materiel but the services that used to be produced in-house. The history of the defense establishment’s changing management practices is crucial for understanding the new kinds of military conflicts and dismantling of public services that took shape in the last third of the twentieth century.
Kate Wersan (Henry Belin du Pont Dissertation Fellow, History, 4 months)
Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Between the Calendar and the Clock: An Environmental History of American Timekeeping, 1680–1920”
This dissertation examines the interrelationship between American perceptions of nature and timekeeping technologies during the long nineteenth century. Since most histories of timekeeping focus on the history of the clock, my research deliberately looks beyond the mechanical clock to understand how Americans attempted to know time in more supple and subtle ways than the clock allowed. By juxtaposing the environmental and cultural history of long nineteenth-century timekeeping practices, amplifying the history of nonmechanical timekeepers to make non-clock timekeeping technologies more visible, my research exposes a far more nuanced history of timekeeping, environmental perception, and American culture. These timekeeping technologies influenced the ways that Euro-Americans though about the nature of time, but they also reflected major trends in the way nineteenth-century Americans perceived the natural world and human nature.
Short-Term Fellows
Julia Luisa Abramson
Associate Professor, French Studies
University of Oklahoma
Finance and Culture: Perspectives from Enlightenment France
Stephen Adams
Professor, Business
Salisbury University
Before the Garage: The Beginnings of Silicon Valley, 1909-1960
Adrienne Ambrose
Assistant Professor, Religious Studies
University of the Incarnate Word
Chromolithography, Collectible Cards, and the Visual Culture of American Catholics, 1873-1938
James Barber
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Texas Tech University
What are they going to do to us now? Fear, Uncertainty and American Business at the End of Bretton Woods
Cynthia Bouton
Professor, History
Texas A&M University
Subsistence, Society, Commerce, and Culture in the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution
Cari Casteel
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Auburn University
The Odor of Things: Deodorant, Gender, and Olfaction in the United States
Katherine Chandler
Assistant Professor, Rhetoric
Georgetown University
Drone Flight and Failure: Secret Trials, Experiments, and Operations, 1936-1991
William Chou
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Ohio State University
Constructing Quality and Appeal: Technology and Japanese Export Promotion, 1952-1982
Heather Davis
Postdoctoral Fellow, Communication
Pennsylvania State University
An Ethology of Plastic
Barbara Day-Hickman
Associate Professor, History
Temple University
Why the du Ponts left France for America: Economic, political, and personal factors that may have influenced the family's emigration to the New World in 1800
Mary Draper
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Virginia
The Urban World of the Early Modern British Caribbean
Linda Frey
Professor, History
University of Montana
Marsha Frey
Professor, History
Kansas State University
Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours' View of International Law
Adams Givens
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Ohio University
On the Wing: Army Aviation from the Cold War to Present Day
David Hochfelder
Professor, History
University at Albany
Thrift in America: From Franklin to the Great Recession
Sebastian Huempfer
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Oxford
Influence of Business Elites on US Trade Policy in the Twentieth-Century
Ben Hurwitz
Ph.D. Candidate, History
George Mason University
The Science of Sheep: Wool Farming on the Edges of the Nineteenth-Century Global Economy
Yongwoo Jeung
Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science
University of Oregon
The National Chamber’s Role in the Job Corps Program in the 1960s
Rachel Lance
Ph.D. Candidate, Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
The Sinking of the Confederate Submarine H. L. Hunley
Jessica Levy
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Johns Hopkins University
From Black Power to Black Empowerment: Transnational Capital and Racial Integration in the United States and South Africa, 1969-1994
Christopher Magra
Associate Professor, History
University of Tennessee
The Transnational Dimensions of Colonial American Business
Katherine Magrader
Ph.D. Candidate, Food Studies
New York University
From Ear to Mouth: National Radio and Culinary Heritages of the US, France, and French-Canada, 1924-1999
Luke Manget
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Georgia
Root Diggers and Herb Gatherers: An Environmental History of the Botanical Drug Industry in Southern Appalachia
Micah McElroy
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Columbia University
The Foundations of Freedom
Jason Resnikoff
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Columbia University
The Misanthropic Sublime: Automation in the Postwar United States
Colin Reynolds
Ph.D. candidate, History
Emory University
Vanguard of the Counterrevolution: The Politics of the American Radical Right, 1940-1991
Kendra Smith-Howard
Associate Professor, History
University at Albany
Green Clean: Health, Nature and the Twentieth-Century Pursuit of Cleanliness
Hannah Spaulding
Ph.D. Candidate, Screen Cultures
Northwestern University
Magnetic Familes and Electronic Futures: Technology, Domesticity, and the Second-Generation Television Moment
Alison Staudinger
Assistant Professor, Political Science & Women/Gender Studies
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
The Political Economy of Repeal
Kathryn Steen
Associate Professor, History
Drexel University
Patent Wars in Electronics, 1920-1960: RCA and its Rivals
Paul Taillon
Senior Lecturer, History
Auckland University
Railroad Labor Relations, Labor Movement Activism, and Railroad Labor Policy in the US from World War I through the 1920s
Helen Tangires
Independent Scholar, National Gallery Art
Shelter for the Middleman: The Wholesale Produce Market in the Twentieth-Century City
Jesse Tarbert
Ph.D. Candidate, History
Case Western Reserve University
When Good Government Meant Big Government: Elite Reformers, Racial Politics, and the American State in the "New Era," 1920-1933
Stephanie Vasko
Postdoctoral Fellow, Social Science
Michigan State University
Weaving a History of Innovation: An Examination of Fiber Development and Responsible Innovation
Troy Vettese
Ph.D. Candidate, History
New York University
Non-conventional Capitalism: The Political Economy of Synthetic Fuel in South Africa, Canada, the US and Germany in the Twentieth-Century
Michael Weeks
Ph.D. Candidate, History
University of Colorado, Boulder
Industrializing a Landscape: Northern Colorado and the Making of Agriculture in the Twentieth-Century
Juliette Wells
Associate Professor, English
Goucher College
Austen in America: Readers, Reception, Reinvention
E. James West
Ph.D. Candidate, American Studies
University of Manchester
Distilling of a Sense of Self: The Seagram Company, African American History and Corporate Responsibility in the 1970s
Holly Stevens White
Ph.D. Candidate, History
College of William and Mary
Adolescence in the Early Republican Mid-Atlantic: Conception of Age, Communities, of Knowledge, and Youth Cultures