Several Newberry long-term fellows have arrived and are getting settled in their carrels. You can read about each scholar's research projects below! Four other long-term fellows will arrive at the Newberry later in the 2026-27 fellowship year. Learn more about the full cohort of long-term fellows as well as our other awarded fellowships, here.
Jade E. Bird - Robert C. and Margaret R. Ketterer and Mellon Foundation Fellow
Independent Scholar
Shakespeare's Playhouse Fencers
Jade's research project looks at the actors of Shakespeare’s world who travelled, taught, and fought as fencers. She argues that these transnational training networks of fencers, their unique styles of swordplay, and the contributions of fencers to the drama of the stage are relatively understudied compared with the poetry and dialogue of the plays performed. Her research into these non-verbal, extratextual languages of the playhouse seeks to fill this gap in the literature of performance studies.
Antonina Woodsum - Monticello College Foundation Fellow
Wesleyan University
Doing Time: Carceral Power, Settler Colonialism, and Indigenous Relations in North America, 1890-1953
Focusing on the borderlands regions of the Southwest and Northeast, Nina will explore the fragmented archives of governmental bureaucracy and surveillance to argue that by implicating non-Native people in the carceral apparatus that targeted Native peoples, the American state performed a double deprivation on Native sovereignty – that of jurisdiction over place, and over/between people.
Jeffrey Sklansky - Mellon Foundation Fellow
University of Illinois at Chicago
The Work of Retirement: A Labor History of the American Pension
Jeff’s project investigates the rise and fall of the US pension system. His research reveals the stakes underpinning the labor struggle for pensions and the financial means of retirement. By studying the transformation of taxation, public spending, and private employment, Jeffrey shows the changing relationships between labor unions and major employers, Wall Street fund managers and workers, as well as nursing assistants and retirees.
Michael Kramer - Lloyd Lewis Fellow in American History
SUNY Brockport
Experimental Dance in Seventies Chicago
Michael's research will explore the expansion of experimental dance in 1970s Chicago through the lens of the Newberry's Ann Barzel dance research collection. He seeks to demonstrate how a diverse scene of Chicago dancers combined national avant-garde performance ideas with more overt investigations of social identities, mediating larger concepts of self, community, region, nation, democracy, and civic belonging during the turbulent 1970s.
Moreno Pacheco - Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee and Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel Fellow
Federal University of Bahia
Bahia Before the Fall
Moreno's research problematizes the historical narrative surrounding the 1763 transfer of colonial Brazil's capital from Salvador da Bahia to Rio de Janeiro. He argues that the transfer, long understood as an act of high imperial strategy, overlooks the escalating racial and social tensions in Salvador itself. He seeks to foreground the social history of Salvador within the established narrative of the southward shift of political power by evaluating clashes between Portuguese officials and colonial subjects, particularly the challenges emanating from Salvador's Black brotherhoods.
Becoming a Newberry Fellow
If you are interested in becoming a Newberry fellow, applications for the 2027-28 fellowship year are open now.