Awarded Fellowships

Diana Berruezo-Sánchez
Audrey Lumsden Kouvel and Mellon Foundation Fellow
AY 2023-24
Postdoctoral Scholar in Literature, University of Barcelona and University of Oxford
Linguistic Blackness: Identity and Multilingual Practices In Early Modern Iberia (1500-1700)

Diana Berruezo-Sánchez is a Lecturer at the Universitat de Barcelona and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she held full-time research and teaching positions for six years. Her main research interests focus on the cultural legacy of the Afro-Iberian diaspora in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. Diana’s forthcoming monograph, Black Voices: The Literary Legacy of Black Africans in Early Modern Spain, examines the cultural agency of Black women and men, and their collective and anonymous contributions to the literary texts of the period. She has obtained funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the John Fell Fund, the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation to lead interdisciplinary research projects at the University of Oxford and the Universitat de Barcelona. Her Newberry project, Linguistic Blackness: Identity and Multilinguial practices in Early Modern Iberia (1500-1700), looks at Afro-Iberian’s multilingual practices as sites of transcultural negotiation and identity-building.

Rafe Blaufarb
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Spring 2024
Professor of History, Florida State University
Moral Regeneration, Financial Crisis, and Capitalism in the French Revolution

Rafe Blaufarb teaches French history at Florida State University. While a fellow, he will be conducting research for a book on the fiscal politics of the Revolution. It will explore how the Revolution sought to shift the emphasis of capitalist activity from speculation in government debt to the production of commodities in order to achieve moral regeneration and economic revival. Before 1789, French financiers mainly invested in debt. This drew capital from the productive economy, starving agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce of funds. The revolutionaries sought to change this by reimbursing the entire public debt and ceasing to borrow. This would force capital into the productive economy, stimulating prosperity and employment for the poor. Moral and economic renewal would go hand-in-hand. My book will tell the story of this attempt at moral-economic transformation and show how it helped plant the seeds of what the nineteenth-century came to call "capitalism."

Katherine Calvin
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Fall 2023
Assistant Professor of Art History, Kenyon College
Antiquarian Speculations: Art, Credit, and Collecting between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1660-1830

Katherine Calvin is Assistant Professor of Art History at Kenyon College. In 2020, she received her PhD, as well as the Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interrogates questions of value, both aesthetic and financial, in relation to early modern antiquarianism, print culture, and imperial mercantile networks connecting the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe with West Africa and the Caribbean.

As a fellow at the Newberry, Calvin will conduct research for her first book, which links current repatriation disputes to early modern financial speculation and collecting practices, particularly by Europeans in the Ottoman Empire. It examines how money generated by merchant companies, such as the British Levant Company, through risky and often exploitative investments financed new expeditions to ancient sites such as Palmyra and Athens. She will then continue this research during fellowships at the Huntington Library and Art Museum (Spring 2024) and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Fall 2024).

KJ Cerankowski
Richard H. Brown/William Lloyd Barber Fellow
AY 2023-24
Associate Professor of American Studies and Gender and Sexuality, Oberlin College
Roar of Wanting: Touching Trans History

KJ Cerankowski is an associate professor of Comparative American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Oberlin College. He is the author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming and co-editor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives. His writing also appears in WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

At the Newberry, KJ will be starting archival research for a new book project, Roar of Wanting: Touching Trans History, a collection of essays about object encounters in the archive. The project explores not only how we tell transgender history but also why we tell it and what we want from it. Blending historiography and narrative essay to tell a sensory and affective trans history, these archive stories weave together personal narrative and historical context to help us think anew about what we can do with archives and how we use storytelling to discover ourselves and envision more just futures.

Aileen A. Feng
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
AY 2023-24
Associate Professor of Italian, University of Arizona
Feminism's First Paradox: Female Misogyny and Homosociality in Early Modern Italy

Aileen A. Feng is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Arizona. Her books include Writing Beloveds: Humanist Petrarchism and the Politics of Gender; The Poetry of Burchiello: Deep-fried Nouns, Hunchbacked Pumpkins, and Other Nonsense (co-translated/edited with Fabian Alfie); and, Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry (co-edited with Unn Falkeid). Her research has been supported by Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Renaissance Society of America.

At the Newberry she will complete her monograph, Feminism’s First Paradox: Female Misogyny & Homosociality in Early Modern Italy, which situates the first generations of Italian women writers (ca. 1400-1645) within a longer tradition of misogynist writings about women and views their engagement with and in it as fundamental to the creation of a female voice and discursive space. From explicitly denouncing misogyny, to ventriloquizing its “lessons” through the female voice, or reinscribing its tropes into positive and productive forms of female creativity, early women writers found their voice in the gray area between misogynist and pro-woman literature. Feminism’s First Paradox thus seeks to contextualize female misogyny within the broader cultural and literary traditions that predate, coincide with, and continue on from it.

Jessica Goethals
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
AY 2023-24
Associate Professor of Italian, University of Alabama
The Literary Sack of Rome (1527): Gender, Language, Genre

Jessica Goethals is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Alabama. A specialist in medieval and early modern literature, she explores women’s writing, violence, spectacle and performance, prophecy, and print culture. She earned her PhD in Italian Studies at New York University and has received long-term research support from the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Center, Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the Folger Library. Her first monograph, Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court, will be published by the University of Toronto Press in Fall 2023.

Her second book is entitled The Literary Sack of Rome: Anticipation to Aftermath. This project rereads the cataclysmic 1527 Sack of Rome, an event that shocked Europe with its unbridled violence, torture, and sacrilege. The tragedy prompted a burst of writing, particularly in the vernacular, across genres, registers, and language traditions. Primed to see the Sack as an event both inevitable and literary, authors responded to this as an occasion for new and innovative writing, permitting them to both interpret the event itself and to advocate for shifts in the cultural landscape. While at the Newberry, Goethals will be looking specifically at manuscript and print collections that highlight the Sack’s implications for gender, genre, and language debates.

Goethals’s previous publications on the subject include articles and chapters on the rhetoric of violence, representations of sexual assault, parody, and popular print culture. Her most recent essay, “Pietro Aretino’s (un)Virgilian Sack of Rome,” was published in Spring 2023 in Renaissance Studies.

Fabien Montcher
Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee Fellow
AY 2023-24
Assistant Professor of History, Saint Louis University
On Natural Sovereignty: A History of the Early-Modern Citrus Craze across the Iberian Worlds (1400s-1700s)

Fabien Montcher is Assistant Professor of History at Saint Louis University. He works on the early-modern social history of knowledge and politics with a special, but not exclusive, emphasis on Iberian worlds. His first book, Mercenaries of Knowledge: Vicente Nogueira, the Republic of Letters, and the Making of Late Renaissance Politics will come out in 2023 with Cambridge University Press. At the Newberry, Fabien will be writing a new book tentatively entitled On Natural Sovereignty: A History of the Early-Modern Citrus Craze across the Iberian Worlds (1400s-1700s). His research has been supported by the UCLA Clark Library, the Huntington Library, the ACLS, the NEH, the American Philosophical Society, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the FLAD Foundation in Lisbon, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

Hayley Negrin
Lloyd Lewis Fellow in American History
AY 2023-24
Assistant Professor of History, University of Illinois at Chicago
Fugitive Lands: Indigenous Slavery and Sovereignty in the Early American South

Hayley Negrin is an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago specializing in the early Indigenous history of North America. Her book manuscript in progress charts the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and racial slavery in American History. She has served as a researcher on a federal Indian law case and has published several pieces in the Washington Post on the Indian Child Welfare Act, and racial representations of Native people in America. Her recent William and Mary Quarterly article “Cockacoeske’s Rebellion: Nathaniel Bacon, Indigenous Slavery, and Sovereignty in Early Virginia” reinterprets the rise of racial slavery in the American South through the lens of Indigenous women and is based off her work with members of the Pamunkey tribe in Virginia. She will be researching and writing her book, tentatively titled Fugitive Lands: Sovereignty and Slavery in the Early American South while at the Newberry.

Zozan Pehlivan
Monticello College Foundation Fellowship for Women and Mellon Foundation Fellow
AY 2023-24
Assistant Professor of History, University of Minnesota
The Political Ecology of Forced Sedentarization: Herd Dependent Peoples, Climate Change, and the Encroaching State

Zozan Pehlivan is Assistant Professor of History and McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She is an environmental historian with a focus on the relationship between environmental stress and the rise of inter-communal violence in the Middle East. Her innovative interdisciplinary research has been awarded by many institutions, including the Institute of Historical Research (2011), American Society for Environmental History (2018), and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2021). Dr. Pehlivan is a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award and her article “El Niño and the Nomads” (2020) was awarded the Ömer Lütfi Barkan Article Prize by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

Dr. Pehlivan’s first monograph, When the Animals Died: Environment and Violence in Late Ottoman Kurdistan, examines the outcome of recurrent nineteenth century global climate fluctuations and related Ottoman policies on pastoralists. By focusing on the impacts of climate change on the deterioration of limited natural resources, the book charts the importance of material conditions on the rise of ethnoreligious tensions between Muslim Kurdish pastoralists and Christian Armenian peasants on the eve of the Great War.

While in residence at the Newberry, Dr. Pehlivan will work on a comparative project examining imperial responses to environmental stress during the modern era (1830-1930). This project analyzes the relationship between climate change, state policies, dispossession, violence, and criminalization of Indigenous populations, and proposes a comparative study of forced sedentarization (iskan in Turkish) and migration of herd-dependent peoples between diverse environmental and political contexts. Taking as case studies the Great Plains, the British Punjab, and Ottoman-Kurdistan, the project will analyze the ways in which American, British, and Ottoman imperial powers consolidated control in areas inhabited by herd-dependent groups. The goal of this research is to explore the connection between current conditions of violence and global inequality and histories of environmental change.

At the Newberry, Dr. Pehlivan will work with the Newberry’s extensive manuscript, photograph, and map collections, particularly the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Collections which contain substantive archival documents on the Great Plains.

Aldair Rodrigues
Mellon Foundation Fellow
Fall 2023
Associate Professor; Professor Doutor MS 3.2, History, UNICAMP - State University of Campinas (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
The African Origins and Construction of Blackness in Brazil (1750-1822)

Aldair Rodrigues is professor of Brazilian History at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). He obtained his PhD in Social History from the University of São Paulo (USP) in 2012. His doctoral dissertation examined the Inquisition and discrimination in the Portuguese empire, specifically focusing on the social impacts of the statutes of purity of blood in Brazilian society. Between 2017 and 2022, he served as the director of the Edgard Leuenroth Archive (AEL).

Rodrigues is the author of two published works: "Limpos de Sangue" (Alameda, 2011) and "Igreja e Inquisição no Brasil: agentes, carreiras e mecanismos de promoção social" (Alameda, 2014). Since 2013, his research has focused on the African diaspora, with a particular interest in West African body markings, origins, and the construction of blackness in eighteenth-century Brazil. He co-edited the book "A Diáspora Mina: africanos entre o Brasil e o golfo do Benim" (Nau, 2020). He also has published articles in renowned academic journals such as Slavery and Abolition, Journal of African Religions, and Afro-Asia. Recently, he collaborated with Moacir Maia on the publication of "Sacerdotisas voduns e rainhas do Rosário" (Chão, 2023).

While in residence at the Newberry Library, Rodrigues will examine the social construction of African difference in Brazil during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries emphasizing the historical formation of blackness in its complex relation with the multiplicity of African origins. To understand these dynamics, he will focus on the underlying logic of the textual and iconographic description of African peoples in travel accounts produced in the Lusophone Atlantic and in writings by merchants, slave-owners, and administrators who traveled to Brazil. Both kinds of sources are well-represented in the Greenlee Collection and can also be found in the Edward Ayer Collection.

Javier Villa-Flores
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
AY 2023-24
Associate Professor of Religion, Emory University
Forgers: Public Faith and The Dark Side of Trust in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Javier Villa-Flores is Associate Professor of Religion at Emory University. His work revolves around issues of religion, colonialism, and the social history of language in colonial Mexico. His first book Carlo Ginzburg: The Historian as Theoretician (1995) offered an epistemological discussion of the historian's craft focusing on Carlo Ginzburg's work. His second book, Dangerous Speech: A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico (2006) analyzes the representation, prosecution and punishment of blasphemous speech in New Spain from 1520 to 1700. In addition to several articles and book chapters, Villa-Flores is also coeditor of two well-received volumes: Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico (2014, with Sonya Lipsett-Rivera), and From the Ashes of History: Loss and Recovery of Libraries and Archives in Latin America (2015, with Carlos Aguirre).

At the Newberry Library, Villa-Flores will be working on Forgers: Public Faith and The Dark Side of Trust in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, a book drawing from a wide array of criminal cases to explore the paradoxical relationship between social trust, deception, and colonial domination in Eighteenth Century Mexico.

Villa-Flores received his undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, and his doctoral degree at the University of California San Diego. Before moving to Emory, he taught for 16 years at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work has been supported by the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Max Planck Institute for European Law, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University.