Mary Catherine Mooney Fellowship

Tails of books with marbled paper   A Mary Catherine Mooney Fellowship, courtesy of a long-time teacher in the Boston Public School system, offers a stipend of $1,500 for a residency of twenty days (four weeks) and includes a year’s membership to the Boston Athenæum. Scholars, graduate students, independent scholars, teaching faculty, and professionals in the humanities as well as teachers and librarians in secondary public, private, and parochial schools are eligible. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or foreign nationals holding the appropriate U.S. government documents. Applications are due by April 15 of every year.

Applicants must submit a curriculum vitae and proposal listing specific materials from the Boston Athenæum’s collections. Graduate students must also include a letter of recommendation from their faculty advisor. Candidates will be notified by June 15.

Mail applications to: Boston Athenæum, 10 ½ Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108 or email applications to: warnement@bostonathenaeum.org

Past Recipients of a Mary Catherine Mooney Fellowship

2012-2013

  • Sam Haselby, Visiting Assistant Professor, American University of Beirut, “Anglo-American Religion and China Missions”
  • Gretchen Henderson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, MIT, “Galerie de Difformité and artists’ books”

2011-2012 Kim Beil, Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Irvine, "Illustrating Contingency: Photographic Reproductions of Art and Film"

2010-2011  Michaelene Cox, professor, Illinois State University, “John Lawson Stoddard” 

2009-2010 Wei Kang Tchou, Ph.D student, University of Cambridge, “Robert Morrison’s Chinese English Dictionary (1815-23)."

2008-2009

  • Damien Boutillon, Ph.D. candidate at Durham University (U.K.), for conducting research in the library of Gypsy (Roma) scholar Francis Hindes Groome
  • Philip Edward Phillips (Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University), for a book project, Poe and Boston
  • Tom F. Wright, Ph.D. candidate at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge (dissertation, “The Travel Lecture in the Mid-Nineteenth Century United States”)

2007-2008

  • Edward E. Andrews, Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Hampshire (dissertation, “Prodigal Sons:  Indigenous Missionaries in the British Atlantic, 1640-1790”)
  • Patricia Roeser, Ph.D. candidate at Arizona State University (dissertation, “Towards Democratization:  Boston’s Cultural Landscapes, 1820-2000”)
  • Aaron Winter, Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine (dissertation, “The Laughing Dove:  Satire in 19th Century U.S. Anti-War Rhetoric”)

2006-2007

  • Gabriel Abend (Northwestern University), "A Social History of 'Business Ethics' and 'Social Responsibility' (1865-1934)
  • Ousmane Power-Greene (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), "Against Wind and Tide: African Americans' Response to the Colonization Movement and Emigration, 1780 -1865"
  • Billy Sothern (Capital Appeals Project, New Orleans)

 2005-2006

  • Jeffrey A. Fortin (University of New Hampshire), "'Little short of national Murder:' Removal, Exile and the Making of the Diasporas in the Atlantic World, 1745-1865"
  • Katherine Hijar (Johns Hopkins University), "Sexuality, Print, and Popular Visual Culture in the United States, 1830-1870"
  • Daniel C. Wewers (Harvard University), "Cradle of Secession: Religion, Politics, and the Idea of Disunion in the Early Republic, 1787-1820"

2004-2005

  • Thomas Augst (Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota), to work on a book project , “The Sobriety Test:  Temperance and the Melodramas of Modern Citizenship.”
  • Heather S. Nathans (Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre, University of Maryland), to support her research for “Lifting the Veil of Black:  Sentiment and Slavery on the American Stage, 1787-1861.”

2003-2004

  • John Donoghue (Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and teacher at Mt. Lebanon High School), for his dissertation “’the Very State of Action, the Market Place of the World’:  Republicanism in the Atlantic World of Militant Protestantism, 1630-1690.”
  • Eric Plaag (Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Carolina), to conduct research on “Travel, Time, and Sensory Experience, and Sectional Difference in the Antebellum South.”

2002-2003

  • Glenn MacLeod (Professor, University of Connecticut, Waterbury), “Authenticity in American Art and Literature:  From Casts and Copies to the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
  • Michael J. Rawson (Ph.D. candidate, University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Nature and the City:  Class, Power, and the Creation of Metropolitan Boston, 1820-1920.”
  • William Van Arragon (Ph.D. candidate, Indiana University), “Cotton Mather in American Cultural Memory, 1778-1892.”
  • Diana Irene Williams (Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University) “’They Call it a Marriage’:  Interracial Families in Post –Emancipation Louisiana."

2001-2002

  • Kate Culkin (Ph.D. candidate, New York University) "Slight a Girl as She Was: Gentility, Reform, and Harriet Hosmer."
  • Colin McCoy (Ph.D. candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) "Democracy in Print: The Literature of Persuasian in Jacksonian America, 1815-1845."
  • Jill McDonough (poet) A project to write a series of sonnets based on executions in United States History.
  • Irene Smalls (storyteller, author, performance artist)

 2000-2001 No fellowships offered due to renovation

 

1999-2000

  • Gretchen A. Adams (Doctoral candidate, University of New Hampshire), “The Specter of Salem in American Culture, 1692-1999.”
  • Kate Clifford (University of New Hampshire), to produce a scholarly biography of Harriet Tubman.
  • Julie Levin (Ph.D. candidate, University of Texas, Austin), to analyze the work of artist Allan Rohan Crite.
  • Andrea McCarthy and Carol Siriani (Team-teachers, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School), to develop an American literature and social studies curriculum for the period 1870 to 1920.

1997-1998

  • Mary T. Adams (Third-Grade Teacher, the Blackstone School, Boston) to prepare a curriculum unit on Boston’s colonial history.
  • Elizabeth Call (Librarian, Mountain West College, Salt Lake City), to study the life and work of Boston artist and designer Sarah Wyman Whitman.
  • Irina Khrouleva (Post-doctoral student, Moscow State University, Russia), to revise for publication her dissertation on New England radical Puritanism.
  • Eileen Rebmen (American Studies teacher, Bullis School, Potomac, Maryland) to research the New England slave trade.

1996-1997

  • Laura Davidson (book artist) to develop an original work based on the Athenæum copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
  • Wilfred E. Holton (Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University), to investigate aspects of Boston’s cultural life in 1900 for a book project.
  • Anthony Mann (doctoral candidate in America Studies, Keele University, England) whose dissertation explores the influence of Great on Britain on the Boston “aristocracy” during the nineteenth century.
  • John Saillant (visiting Assistant Professor of History, M.I.T.), to write a history of the migration of African American sot Sierra Leone and Liberia.
  • Alexander Djordjadze (doctoral candidate, Moscow State University, Russia), to research the evangelical church in the socio-political structure of the Confederacy.