#lcpfellowfriday

Call for Proposals – First Biennial Innovation Award

The Library Company of Philadelphia is still accepting applications for its First Biennial Innovation Award. The Innovation Award will recognize a project—digital or analog—that critically and creatively expands the possibilities of humanistic scholarship.

The recipient of the Innovation Award will receive a $2,000 prize, a spotlight interview in our “Talking in the Library” podcast, and recognition at the 288th Annual Dinner of the Library Company of Philadelphia (October 29, 2019).

Proposals will be evaluated by a committee of leaders in higher education, research libraries, and cultural heritage institutions who will evaluate how proposed projects make scholarly work new again. That scholarly work might take the form of an article, chapter, academic monograph, scholarly edition, or other project, in either print or digital form. “Innovation” will be defined broadly, and may include refashioning scholarly work with new partners, for new audiences, or into new forms.

We welcome proposals from applicants in all fields and at all career stages, including graduate students, junior and senior faculty, as well as independent scholars. Visit the Innovation Award webpage for complete details.

In the "Keywords" issue of Early American Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Danielle C. Skeehan’s essay “Archive” looks at the tale of Catalina de Erauso as told in the book “The Lieutenant Nun: Memoirs of a Basque Transvestite in the New World”, asking “How might such a history help us rethink our assumptions about archives and evidence when it comes to doing queer history?” 

Check out the Library Company blog to read our most recent Reader Spotlight: 

Michele Navakas studies the cultural significance of coral. At the Library Company, she found Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children (Boston, 1889), which includes the story "Sea-Life" -- featuring talking coral. The polyps explain the anonymous, self-sacrificing labor of building reefs to a starfish: "We are here to build, and building is all we care to do."  The author Jane Andrews discusses collective labor, but is strangely silent about oppression. #LCPFellowFriday

Andrews, Jane. The stories Mother Nature told her children. Boston.  Lee and Shepard. 1889. 

So you’ve heard us mention our First Biennial Innovation Award, and now you’re wondering how we’ll be evaluating proposals... well, you’re in luck! We are pleased to share the evaluative criteria the award committee will be using.

The Innovation Award will recognize a project—digital or analog—that critically and creatively expands the possibilities of humanistic scholarship.

The recipient of the Innovation Award will receive a $2,000 prize, a spotlight interview in our “Talking in the Library” podcast, and recognition at the 288th Annual Dinner of the Library Company of Philadelphia (October 29, 2019).

Submissions are due by August 1, 2019.

We look forward to reviewing all proposals!

Tim Cassedy’s Figure of Speech (University of Iowa Press, 2019) examines the role that language played at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of one’s identity. During this time of revolution (U.S., French, and Haitian) and globalization, language served as a way to categorize people within a world that appeared more diverse than ever. Linguistic differences, especially among English-speakers, seemed to validate the emerging national, racial, local, and regional identity categories that took shape in this new world order.

Focusing on six eccentric characters of the time—from the woman known as “Princess Caraboo” to wordsmith Noah Webster—Cassedy shows how each put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era’s linguistic ideas. The result is a highly entertaining and equally informative look at how perceptions about who spoke what language—and how they spoke it—determined the shape of communities in the British American colonies and beyond. #LCPFellowFriday

Check out Dr. Brett Goodin's recent article, published on The Conversation website: 

"Sailors’ journals shed new light on Bennelong, a man misunderstood by history"

Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations.   

Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (NYU Press, 2019) examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US.  Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.