NYPL Long-Term Fellowship

The NYPL Long-Term Fellowship supports advanced research at the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities, located in the Library’s flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The Gregorian Center at The New York Public Library is pleased to announce that Rachel E. Smith, PhD has been selected to receive the NYPL Long-Term Fellowship. Dr. Smith is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the history and politics of knowledge production and representation among Sephardic communities in the late Ottoman Empire. Against the backdrop of expanding empires, the rise of anthropology, and shifting notions of race, her research examines how Sephardic writers and thinkers produced, circulated, and mobilized ethnographic and racialized knowledge in the service of various reformist ideologies. She earned her Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2023. She has worked on numerous public history projects including oral history archives, educational programming, and exhibits for the Tenement Museum and the Center for Jewish History in New York, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA.

As an NYPL Long-Term Fellow, Smith will receive a stipend of $45,000 to support her work at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building for a period of nine months.