Fellowships

Rachel received the John M. Murrin Prize for the best article published in Early American Studies in 2021 for, “Facing Race: Popular Science and Black Intellectual Thought in Antebellum America,” Early American Studies 19, no. 3 (Summer 2021). Additionally, Rachel's first book—Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America—will be coming out with the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2022. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo182756428.html

Jeannie's book, Biotic Borders, has been published with the University of Chicago Press (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo131341992.html).

Biotic Borders charts the co-production of race and species over half a century in the human and more-than-human worlds, focusing on Japanese plant, insect, and human immigrants across the Pacific Ocean. Situating plants and insects as important actors in histories of the United States empire and a hemispheric context enables the recentering of more-than-human worlds that have enriched understandings of transpacific racisms in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, Hawai‘i, and Latin America. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials targeted Japanese plant, insect, and human immigrants for fear of San José scale, chestnut blight, citrus canker, the Oriental termite, the Japanese beetle, and other invasions.

Charis has been granted a full scholarship to Middlebury College's prestigious summer language institutes, for Abenaki language study. Charis has also been appointed to the new Inclusion Committee in the Town of Springfield, VT, as part of an effort to bring anthropological and historical training to bear on local planning and governance.
 
Charis's review of Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-based Medicine has been published in the Medical Antrhopology Quarterly.

Mia has two forthcoming publications:

"Exterminating the Phantom: Nativist Constructions of Contagion and Monsters in Nineteenth-Century New York City" will be published in the anthology Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification (eds. Michael Chemers and Analola Santana) in June 2022.

Alicia has published a new book, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022). In this examination of landscape and memory, four sites of American history are revealed as places where historical truth was written over by oppressive fiction—with profound repercussions for politics past and present. Alicia has also published an article, “'Pajamas from Spirit Land': Searching for William James," in Public Domain Review.

Dan's edited volume, with Tracy McDonald, Zoo Studies: A New Humanities won the Choice "Outstanding Academic Title" award for the "Flora and Fauna" category in January 2021. He also published "The Sectionalism of the National Zoo: Animals, Language, Politics, Laughter" in Animal Histories of the Civil War Era, ed. Earl J. Hess (Louisiana State University Press, 2022).

Megan will be an American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) Fellow in partnership with the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins University for the 2022-2023 academic year. Megan has also published several articles:

Piorko, Megan, Marieke Hendriksen, and Simon Werrett. “Introduction: Alchemical Practice: Looking Towards the Chemical Humanities.” Special Issue “Alchemical Practice and the Chemical Humanities,” Ambix 69 no. 1 (2022): 1-18.

Piorko, Megan, Sarah Lang, and Richard Bean. “Deciphering the Philosophers’ Stone: how we cracked a 400-year-old alchemical cipher.” In The Conversation https://theconversation.com/deciphering-the-philosophers-stone-how-we-cracked-a-400-year-old-alchemical-cipher-167900> published online October 13, 2021.

Xiao has been hired as Digital Humanist for University of California Santa Cruz, to provide digital humanities research, instruction, and web consultation, as well as to supervise digital humanities projects of the humanities division and implement IT solutions to meet academic objectives. Previously, as digital humanities specialist at Phillips Academy at Andover, Xiao built a robust, interactive and searchable website (https://chinesestudents.andover.edu/) to archive and exhibit the historical heritage of Phillips Academy in the past 150 years.
 

Julia has been appointed assistant professor of early North American history at Villanova University.

Katherine has been appointed Assistant Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.