Hagley Center Announces NEH Postdoctoral Fellows

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library is pleased to announce the inaugural recipients of the NEH–Hagley Postdoctoral Fellowships on Business, Culture, and Society. These fellowships support residencies in Hagley’s Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society by scholars who have received their doctoral degrees, and are made possible by a three-year, $182,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and its Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions. Two fellowships will be awarded annually, one for four months and one for eight.

Dr. Seth Lunine, Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has accepted the four-month fellowship. His project, “Breakthrough Technology: California Dynamite and the Creation of the U.S. High Explosives Industry, 1865–1895,” 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 will be consulting 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 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Dr. Jennifer A. Greenhill, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California, has accepted the eight-month fellowship. Her project, “The Commercial Imagination: American Illustration and the Materialities of the Market, 1890–1930,” shows how illustrators helped establish the workings of commercial imagery in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20^th century in four places: on the page, in the magazine, at the office, and on the road. Dr. Greenhill will delve into Hagley’s extensive collection of 19^th- and 20^th-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.

For more information about these and other fellowships offered through Hagley, visit our Research Funding page.  For information about other research fellowships supported by the NEH visit their page here.