2010-2011 – Sarah Kate Gillespie, York College of the City University of New York
Sarah Kate Gillespie, Assistant Professor of Art History at York College of the City University of New York used her Visual Culture Fellowship to conduct research for her current project, ‘One Thing New Under the Sun’: The Cross-Currents of Art and Science in the American Daguerreotype, 1839-50. In this book, based on her dissertation, Gillespie will consider the role of the early American daguerreotype in the development of the two poles of photography - the arts and the sciences.
During her fellowship, Gillespie studied the Library Company and Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s rich collections of daguerreotypes, particularly those of Robert Cornelius, Joseph Saxton, William Mason, Walter Rogers, and Paul Beck Goddard and several printed volumes containing engravings after daguerreotypes to examine the circulation of these early photographs.
Past William H. Helfand American Visual Culture Fellows
2007-2008 – Dalila Scruggs, Harvard University
Dalila Scruggs, PhD. candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University performed research for her dissertation “The Love of Liberty Has Brought Us Here”: The American Colonization Society and the Imaging of African-American Settlers in Liberia, West Africa” during her fellowship. Scruggs doctoral work focuses on the visual imaging practices of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and compares and contrasts how the white-run ACS and African-American settlers in Liberia used visual imagery to represent Liberian settler identity to antebellum America as a solution to the “race” problem. Scruggs utilized the manuscript, graphic, art, and book collections of the Library Company and Historical Society of Pennsylvania and examined paintings with a provenance to the Pennsylvania Colonization Society; Abolitionist newspapers, including the Colonization Herald and Pennsylvania Freeman; and visual and textual accounts of the settlement of Liberia, colonization, and abolition.
2008-2009 – Christopher Hunter, California Institute of Technology
Christopher Hunter, Assistant Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology, conducted research for hisdissertation entitled “A New and More Perfect Edition: American Autobiography, 1790-1850.” Dr. Hunter studies the history of the book and the book trades in colonial America and the Early Republic and has published essays on the freedom of the press and the bibliography of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. As the William H. Helfand Fellow, Hunter worked with the Library Company’s extensive collections of Frankliniana to study the images that appeared in many editions of Franklin’s Autobiography. The artists and craftsmen who illustrated Franklin’s Memoirs had an unusually rich visual trope of the life of the aged philosopher and the images they produced are crucial for a full understanding of the development of Franklin’s life story in its myriad forms, as well as for the development of the genre of autobiography more generally
2009-2010 – Anne Verplanck, Penn State University
Anne Verplanck, Associate Professor of American Studies and Heritage Studies at Penn State University performed research for her current book project, The Graphic Arts in Philadelphia, 1780 to 1880. The book will focus on the graphic art produced in Philadelphia and the reasons why the city sustained numerous artists, had several venues for public exhibition and art criticism, and embraced novel art forms and techniques. She made extensive use of the manuscript collections of the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, including the Coxe, Carey, and McAllister collections to explore the cultural forces that shaped a century of artistic patronage and production in one of America’s most prosperous urban centers. Materials documenting Philadelphia’s Sanitary Fair and Centennial Exhibition, and the Moran and Richards photographs in the Library Company’s Print and Photograph Department, also formed a core of Verplanck’s research.