Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellows

 

2023-2024 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellows

M. Leona Godin, Ph.D.
Author
Face of the Blind: Essays on Photography 

Face of the Blind is the working title for a planned series of essays (to be collected into a book) inspired by the many anonymous blind subjects of the Wallach Division. Godin will contextualize these often iconic photographs within a cultural, historical, and theoretical framework that involves image description as both a tool and target of research. Godin’s academic, artistic, and personal interest in blindness and disability theory urges her to consider the blind subjects with as much nuance and research as possible in order to push back at the critical and curatorial tendency to focus attention almost exclusively on the sighted photographers.

 

Ariel Goldberg
Independent Writer, Curator, Educator
Just Captions: Ethics of Trans and Queer Image Cultures, 1970-1999  

Just Captions: Ethics of Trans and Queer Image Cultures, 1970-1999  is an illustrated book of essays about the processes and relationships that ignite photographs as tools of resistance. Just Captions brings to life scenes where images of trans and queer life were cultivated throughout the United States. This timely book weaves together personal narratives with archival research and interviews to illuminate the exhibits, publications, slideshow events, and correspondences where influential image cultures were built.

 

Trina Hyun, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English, University at Buffalo (SUNY)
Media Theologies

Media Theologies courts the counterintuitive and anachronistic intersections of twentieth-century media theory and seventeenth-century theology, identifying suggestive parallels, formative influences, and crucial prehistories for modern media studies in the religious writing of seventeenth-century England. 

 

Dan Joslyn
Ph.D. Candidate, History, New York University
How Love Came of Age: God, Sex, and Socialism in a Gilded Age

This manuscript tells the story of coitus reservatus, a sexual practice that hundreds of thousands of Americans came to believe would allow white middle-class women to determine the future course of "civilization." As it developed on a socialist commune in upstate New York and then spread through the anarchist, socialist, and women's movements, sex without orgasm became yoked to a dissenting vision of political economy, social reproduction, and the family, which sought to reform capitalism, while reaffirming systems of racialized exploitation and dispossession. Advocates believed that coitus reservatus made possible love-based, egalitarian marriages, the reorganization of capitalism to meet the needs of all white women, and the regeneration of the white race through the borning and raising of scientifically superior children. By the early twentieth century, the practice would become so ubiquitous that it and the political vision tied to it helped influence some of the earliest English works advocating for same-sex love and alternative formations of gender as well as some of the texts that defined "modern" sexuality. 

 

Mariana Katz
Ph.D. Candidate, History, Columbia University
The Labor of the State: The Politics of Unfree Work in Nineteenth-Century Paraguay 

Katz's dissertation examines the role of unfree labor in the formation of postcolonial societies through the case of Paraguay. After independence in the 1810s, Paraguayan governments forced thousands of workers, including enslaved Afro-descendants and indigenous people, to build walls and forts, manufacture arms and iron, raise cattle, and surveil wealthy citizens. Through the Schwarzman Building’s unique collection of manuscript reports by foreign observers, newspapers, travel literature, and memoirs, Katz will analyze how these systems of labor coercion not only allowed the state to secure its hegemony, but also paradoxically opened opportunities for these workers to promote their own ideas about the public good, corruption, and loyalty, which would profoundly influence the shape of the new state.

 

2022-2023 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellows

Elya Assayag, Ph.D. Candidate, History, Columbia University
Marriage Law, Domestic Violence and Conversion in Colonial Morocco (1912-1956)  will trace the subject of gender based violence and religious conversions in local communities under the Moroccan French protectorate (1912-1956). Due to the scarcity of written materials on the subject, the project uses new methodologies and new sites of study and will utilize embroidery and material culture to uncover what is missing in traditional textual archives.

S.E. Hackney, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Queens College, CUNY Graduate School of Library and Information Studies
Classification in a Networked World: Viewing the Work of S.R. Ranganathan from the Digital Age will examine the life and writings of LIS scholar S.R. Ranganathan, providing a narrative history of the development of Colon Classification. Additionally Ranganathan's work will be brought into conversation with the contemporary world of born-networked digital information and big data. 
 
Sangamithra Iyer, Independent Researcher
Governing Bodies: A Catena is an ecological history and ethical reckoning of how earthly bodies are controlled by and liberated from colonialism, capitalism, and speciesism. This is an interdisciplinary environmental humanities project that spans critical animal studies, philosophy, engineering ethics, food studies, and decolonization studies. Governing Bodies acts as a catena, linking wide-ranging subjects from personal and planetary grief to invisible inheritances, and asks what it means to embody nonviolence.
 
Carl Kubler, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Chicago
Barbarians on the Shore: Negotiating Global Trade and Daily Life on the South China Coast, 1780-1860 is a book project examines the history of commerce and daily life at the nexus of global interactions between China, America, and Europe in the decades before and after the first Opium War (1839-1842). In particular, it focuses on the dynamics of everyday socioeconomic opportunity seeking and conflict resolution between merchants, sailors, prostitutes, interpreters, coolies, cooks, pirates, and other liminal actors whose global circulations helped shape the course of Sino-Western relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
 
Stefano Morello, Ph.D. Candidate (2023), English, The CUNY Graduate Center
The Lung Block: A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten Italian Immigrant Community juxtaposes the Progressive Era narrative attached to a city block between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges as the epicenter of tuberculosis, and the lived experience of the majority Italian immigrant tenement dwellers therein.

 

2021-2022 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellows

Victoria Baena is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. As a Diamonstein-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 (Mint) Damrongpiwat, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in English at the University of California, Irvine. She recently received her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University. 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, Ph.D. 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, Ph.D. 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. 

 

The Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship Program is made possible through the generous support of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation. For more information on the fellowship, including how to apply, please visit this link.