A New Year at NERFC

More News From Massachusetts Historical Society

Amy Werbel, a Professor of Art History at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, contacted us with the exciting news that she has been selected to be a Fulbright Scholar next year at Guangdong Foreign Studies University in Guangzhou, China, near Hong Kong. She will be teaching American Studies courses and have the opportunity to lecture throughout China.

Amy’s research is on censorship and American visual culture. She received the NERFC fellowship in 2008-2009 to support her project “A Long, Dark Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Anthony Comstock, 1844-1915” with work at the Connecticut Historical Society, Harvard Law School Special Collections, the Houghton Library, and the Schlesinger Library.

We wish Amy and her family a fascinating and rewarding experience. June 15, 2011



For many graduate students and faculty, June’s arrival merely heralds the start of a well-deserved break, or at least a change of pace brought on by the switch to a summer schedule.

For Consortium members, however, June 1 is the start of our 2011-2012 grants cycle, and the day on which newly-minted fellows begin to arrive at our various institutions. At its March meeting, the Consortium awarded a dozen fellowships to colleagues from as far away as Berkeley and Santa Monica. Their topics range from King Philip’s War to the material culture of women’s health, science in America, and child labor. View the complete list here:
http://www.masshist.org/fellowships/fellows.cfm?fellowship=nerfc

At the M.H.S., we welcomed Carrie Hyde, who is completing her Ph.D. in English at Rutgers University and commencing a tenure-track position at UCLA. In the interim, she is juggling visits to the M.H.S., Harvard Law Library, and the Houghton to conduct research on her project, “Alienable Rights: Negative Figures of U.S. Citizenship, 1787-1868.”

Many of you will recognize the whirlwind schedule on which Carrie has already embarked: Having been at the M.H.S. for only a few hours, Carrie has already delved into the sources, toured our historic building, and participated in a brown-bag lunch talk. We look forward to seeing her at our Thursday Fellows’ Lunches, and to her own brown-bag lunch program on June 10 before we bid goodbye and send her across the Charles.

Eleven other fellows will repeat this scene at fourteen other institutions in the coming months, with seven more visits to the M.H.S. scheduled between now and next May. We invite other current fellows and NERFC alumni to drop by whenever you are in the neighborhood, especially at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday. You might get to enjoy a plate of Pad Thai, but you’re certain to receive a warm welcome!

From the Connecticut Historical Society

Christine DeLucia, a 2010 Fellow, was awarded the 2011 Louis Pelzer Memorial Award by the Organization of American Historians for an essay based in part on her research at the Connecticut Historical Society. The article, to be published in the Journal of American History is entitled "The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast after King Philip's War (1675-1678)".