The New York Public Library's Center For Research In The Humanities Announces The 2021-2022 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellows

Press release from the New York Public Library:

June 15, 2021

JUNE 15, 2021 -- The New York Public Library is pleased to announce the first class of fellows for the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship Program at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Center for Research in the Humanities. This program, established with the generous support of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation, offers mid-term support to scholars and writers whose work will benefit directly from access to the outstanding collections at the Schwarzman Building and is intended to provide support for under-resourced and underrepresented communities in the humanities.

Fellows were selected from a competitive pool of applicants, and many factors were taken into account to ensure the Library built a class of fellows whose work spans a diversity of subject matter from a range of disciplines and who are at different points along their career trajectories. The inaugural 2021-2022 class includes:

• Victoria Baena, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University
• Pichaya Damrongpiwat, Ph.D. Candidate, Cornell University
• John J. Garcia, Assistant Professor, Florida State University
• Laura Ping, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Queens College, CUNY
• Mosi Secret, Journalist

During their fellowship term, Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellows will have access to the world-class research collections and electronic resources of The New York Public Library, as well as the invaluable assistance of its curatorial and reference staff. Fellows will also receive a stipend and the use of a quiet, reserved workspace in the recently renovated Center for Research in the Humanities, located in the Library’s landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

With a fellowship duration of four months, mirroring the typical length of one academic semester, the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowships provide a meaningful platform for the fellows’ scholarship and research, with an added benefit for the public: fellows will be required to make public presentations, related to their work to advance knowledge and ideas in the humanities.

More information is available at nypl.org/fellowships.

About the 2021-2022 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellows

Victoria Baena is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. As a Diamondstein-Spielvogel Fellow, Victoria will research and write a chapter for her book project Lost Illusions: Time, Knowledge, and Narrative in the Provincial Novel which will examine revolutionary- and Napoleonic-era maps of the British and French Empires, placing their rhetorical strategies in conversation with the imagined cartographies of “the provinces” in literary realism.

Pichaya Damrongpiwat is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Cornell University. As a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow, Pichaya will research her project “Every morsel of blank”: Paper Recycling as Literary Practice in Women’s Archives, which argues for revising our understanding of paper recycling in the context of literature using three women writers in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Emily Brontë, Frances Burney, and Emily Dickinson. The project challenges the current understanding of recycling as the result of economic necessity by situating paper recycling within the context of gendered restrictions on women's writing and their resulting literary and composition practices.

John J. Garcia is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. As a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow, John will research Without Order: Booksellers and the Failures of the Early American Book Trade 1679-1825, a scholarly monograph that reconceptualizes the history of the book in colonial America and the early United States through a critical investigation of how booksellers functioned as cultural mediators and as entrepreneurs of the book trade. Reading important flashpoints through the paperwork of the book trade, the project recovers the labors of free and enslaved African Americans who contributed essential work behind book production at key moments of printing, publishing, and papermaking.

Laura Ping is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Queens College, CUNY. As a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow, Laura will research Beyond Bloomers: Fashioning Change in Nineteenth-Century Dress, a research monograph that explores the social and political power of dress in shaping American culture. Through the framework of cultural history, Beyond Bloomers shows that a movement to challenge fashionable clothing (the dress reform movement) politicized women’s bodies, but that fashion too was a method of politicization for women of different races and social classes.

Mosi Secret is an independent journalist who has written for The New York Times and ProPublica. As a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow, Mosi will research a book-length narrative history, Teaching Them: The 1960s Experiment to Desegregate the Boarding Schools of the South. The book will tell the story of the Stouffer Foundation, a small family foundation based in North Carolina that in the late 60s provided scholarships for Black students to attend all-white boarding schools. The desegregation effort doubled as a test of whether the elite, white students at the schools could be cured of their bigotry after exposure to Black students.

About The New York Public Library

For 125 years, The New York Public Library has been a free provider of education and information for the people of New York and beyond. With 92 locations—including research and branch libraries—throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the Library offers free materials, computer access, classes, exhibitions, programming and more to everyone from toddlers to scholars. The New York Public Library receives approximately 16 million visits through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at nypl.org and e-books via its e-reader app SImplyE. To offer this wide array of free programming, The New York Public Library relies on both public and private funding. Learn more about how to support the Library at nypl.org/support.

About the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation

The Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation was established by Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel and Ambassador Carl Spielvogel to continue and extend their long-term commitment to the common good and the public interest. The Foundation creates, supports, and seeks original projects based on results-driven and innovative strategies. All funding initiatives are by invitation only.

This press release was produced by the New York Public Library. The views expressed are the author's own.