2023-2024 Friends of Princeton University Library Research Grants recipients are announced

Princeton University Library is pleased to announce the final recipients of the 2023-24 Friends of Princeton University Library Research Grants. The grant program will support visits from 36 researchers to Princeton in the coming year. The awardees and their projects are listed below. Information about the grants program can be found on the Library Research Grants page.

2023-2024 Friends of Princeton University Library Research Grants
Name, Title of Project, Library Unit(s). The funding source is the Friends of Princeton University Library unless otherwise noted in parentheses.

• Arianna Afsari, “Toward a Third Poetry: Reflections on a Counterpoetry of Liberation and Anti-colonial Resistance through the Poetry of Juan Gelman,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Saban Agalar, “Conceptions of Religion and the Religions in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Shuaib Ally, “Tracing the Use, Function and Spread of Supercommentary Writing through Paratexts: Balāgha and Tafsīr,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Rubi Carreño, “The Diamela Eltit Archive as a Memory of Emancipation,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Wai Yee Chiong, “Bound and Unbound: Examining Avian Picture Books in the Edo Period,” Marquand Art and Archaeology Library.
• Isaura Contreras Rios, “The Writer’s Diary in 20th and 21st Century Latin American Literature,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Louise de Mello, “The Living Memory of Brazil's National Museum: Rebuilding its Collections Through Historical Archives,” American West Collection, Historic Maps Collection, Manuscripts Collection, Rare Books Collection. (Brazil LAB Fund and Maxwell Fund)
• Scott Eaton, “Covenanting Scottish Women: Literature, Gender and Identity,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Tian Gao, “Tiny Books for Little Hands? A Study of Japanese Miniature Picturebooks in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Cotsen Children's Library. (Cotsen Fund)
• Alejandro García Lidón, “The Coinage of the Western Byzantine Empire in the Firestone Library,” Numismatics Collection.
• Foteini Gazi, “Crossing Lines in the 20th Century: Empires, Wars, Nations,” Manuscripts Collection, Princeton University Archives. (Hellenic Studies Fund)
• Amin Ghadimi, “Leroy Lansing Janes and the Intellectual Origins of the 1877 Japanese Civil War,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Jingya Guo, “Medical, Monstrous and Myriad: Controversial Bodies and Gender Politics in China, 1500-1890,” East Asian Library, Rare Books Division.
• Taylor Hare, “The Sightless but Immortal Bard: Milton and the Nineteenth-Century Tactile Book,” Cotsen Children’s Library, Graphic Arts Collection, Rare Book Collection. (Cotsen Fund)
• Elsbeth Heaman, “A Biography of Jacob Viner,” Public Policy Papers
• Zoe Jaques, “Bookish Things: Pop-up, Movable, and Interactive Books for Children,” Cotsen Children’s Library. (Cotsen Fund)
• Rachael King, “Keeping an Account: Women’s Books and the Spaces of Self-Improvement,” Cotsen Children’s Library, Manuscripts Collection, Rare Books Collection. (Sid Lapidus '59 Research Fund for Studies of the Age of Revolution and the Enlightenment in the Atlantic World)
• Kenneth Loiselle, “Revolutionary Transformations of Freemasonry in the French Atlantic, 1789-1804,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Madelyn Lugli, “Foreign Affairs: The Interwar's Personal Interpretation of Internationalism,” Public Policy Papers.
• Benjamin Marschall, “David Lewis’s Australian Correspondence and the Revival of Metaphysics,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Shane Morrissy, “The Roots of the Postcard Craze: Advertising Sapolio Soap and the Construction of the Commodity Fetish in America (1870-1920),” Manuscripts Collection.
• Ipek Sahinler, “El Medio Oriente de Severo Sarduy,” Manuscripts Collection, Princeton University Archives.
• Janet Neary, “Speculative Life: Black Literature and Visual Culture of the Nineteenth-Century West,” American West Collection, Graphic Arts Collection, Historic Maps Collection, Marquand Art and Archaeology Library.
• Ross Nedervelt, “Security, Imperial Reconstitution, and the British Atlantic Islands in the Age of the American Revolution,” Historic Maps Collection, Manuscripts Collection, Rare Books Collection. (Sid Lapidus '59 Research Fund for Studies of the Age of Revolution and the Enlightenment in the Atlantic World)
• Mónica Ni, “María Rosa Oliver and Ricardo Piglia: Interdictions Between Politics and Culture in the Making of Global Maoism (1952-1973),” Manuscripts Collection.
• Caitlin O'Keefe, “Odéonia: Reading Feminist Internationalism and the Making of Interwar Paris,” Manuscripts Collection.
• Sarath Pillai, “Federal Futures: Imagining Federation, Constitution, and World in Late Colonial India,” Rare Books Collection, Manuscripts Collection.
• Ellen Pilsworth, “Early Warners: Publishing for English Readers by anti-Nazi Refugees in the Years of Appeasement and War (1933-45),” Manuscripts Collection.
• Cassia Roth, “Birthing Abolition: Reproduction and the End of Slavery in Brazil,” Manuscripts Collection. (Maxwell Fund)
• Gina Saraceni, “Animals of the Archive: The Tearing of the Voice,” Manuscripts Collection, Princeton University Archives, Rare Books Division. (Program in Latin American Studies Fund)
• Warren Schultz, “Cataloguing Mamluk Coins: Incorporating the Antioch Hoard and Undeland Collection into Mamluk Monetary History,” Numismatics Collection.
• Megan Swift, “Pages from the Past, Early Soviet Classics on the Post-Socialist Child’s Bookshelf,” Cotsen Children’s Library. (Cotsen Fund)
• Rodrigo Viqueira, “Archives of Labor: Álvaro Yunque and Left-Wing Print Culture in Argentina,” Manuscripts Collection, Rare Books Collection.
• Jane Wessel, “Theatre and the Extra-Illustrated Book: Participatory Reading and Fandoms in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England,” Rare Books Collection.
• Matthew Zipf, “The Speechwriter of the Inquiry: Renata Adler and the Impeachment of President Nixon,” Public Policy Papers. (Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library Fund)
• Maria Zymara, “(Un)Real Athens, (Un)Νoticed Gender: A Feminist Reading of Greek Modernism,” Manuscripts Collection. (Hellenic Studies Fund)

The library received 114 applications this year, a 60% increase from last year’s submissions. 

“I am glad that we had so many strong applications this year,” said Dan Linke, University Archivist and Deputy Head of Special Collections, who oversaw the application process. “Applicants sought to use new collections acquired during the pandemic, as well as our many core strengths, and the results of their research should be fascinating.”
 
The first round of reviews by Library staff narrowed the group down to 57. These 57 applications were then reviewed by the Grant Review Committee:

• Sara Logue, Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections Public Services (Chair)
• John Bidwell, Friends of Princeton University Library Representative
• Molly Dotson, Graphic Arts Librarian
• Elena Fratto, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
• Stan Katz, Friends of Princeton University Library Representative, Lecturer with rank of Professor of Public and International Affairs, President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies
• Rosina Lozano, Associate Professor of History
• Phoebe Nobles, Processing Archivist

Princeton University Library (PUL) wishes to thank the selection committee and the Friends of PUL for their ongoing support of the grants program, as well as the support from the Brazil LAB Fund, Program in Latin American Studies, Hellenic Studies, the Cotsen Children’s Library, and an anonymous supporter of the Mudd Manuscript Library. The substantial funding of nearly $141,000 in total has allowed PUL to continue to support a wide range of scholarship and research this year, and showcase the important special collections holdings held within the Library.

Published May 16, 2023.

Media contact: Barbara Valenza, Director of Library Communications