Current Fellows

Against Earth: Architectural Underground and Foundation in Sixteenth-to-Seventeenth Century Italy

Yeo-Jin Katerina Bong is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. She also served as a predoctoral fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2023–2024. Her doctoral project investigates the role of “failure” in foundation, material, and structure during the phases of construction, as described in early modern architectural treatises. 

Through the Linda Hall Library’s expansive collection on geoscience, Katerina will concentrate on expanding her knowledge of proto-geology and its relationship to architecture. To that end, she will examine the writings of Ulisse Aldrovandi, Girolamo Cardano, Athanasius Kircher, Bernard Palissy, Georgius Agricola, and Nicolas Steno. Tapping into her expertise on early modern architectural foundations, she is hoping to find parallel developments in both disciplines during a period that saw major advancements in scientific knowledge.  

North American Fruitgrowers’ Associations and Fireblight

Kathryn Bruce is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where she also teaches undergraduate classes focusing on a global approach to the history of the long nineteenth century. She holds a Master of Arts (Honors) in History and a Master of Letters in Modern History, both from St Andrews. 

Her thesis aims to investigate the creation and communication of knowledge among communities of “experts” in Canada, New Zealand, and the United States between 1880 and 1939. Using the orchard disease Fireblight as a “cultural tracer,” her research will identify and explore how knowledge about fruitgrowing and Fireblight was created, codified, and communicated within and between groups of orchardists, scientists, and civil servants. 

While in Kansas City, Bruce intends to make use of the Linda Hall Library’s vast array of journals, annual reports, magazines, proceedings, and transactions produced by American horticultural societies and fruitgrowers’ associations. Combined with the collections of bulletins produced by the US Department of Agriculture, Bussey Institute, and other state-level agricultural experiment stations, this research will help her to better understand the creation and communication of Fireblight knowledge in the United States. This analysis will move beyond reductive dichotomies of “popular” or “folk” and “expert” science by examining how communities with expert knowledge but who were not formally trained professional scientists understood the natural world and shared their insights with different audiences.  

Animals, Empire, and Zoos in Modern Paris

Claire Cage is a Professor of History and the Director of Gender Studies at the University of South Alabama. She earned her PhD in History at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720-1815, was published in 2015 and received the Baker-Burton Prize from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Her latest book, The Science of Proof: Forensic Medicine in Modern France, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. 

During her Linda Hall Library fellowship, she will research the history of the menagerie at the Muséum national d'Histoire Naturelle, located in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. This research is part of her current book project on the history of Parisian zoos from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. 

Surveying the Tropics, Constructing the Heartland: Identity Formation in Nicaragua and the Midwest

Nathan Chaplin is a PhD candidate studying the history of science and medicine at the University of Iowa. His dissertation explores the relationships between Midwestern and Nicaraguan elites during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paying special attention to the prominent roles played by civil engineers, physicians, and academics. Throughout this period, scientists from both regions collaborated on large-scale infrastructure projects, including railway systems, hospitals, and a transisthmian canal, in the process creating new regional and national identities.  

As a virtual fellow with the Linda Hall Library, Chaplin will examine several collections related to civil engineering in Nicaragua. These materials include numerous conference proceedings tied to the Nicaragua Canal, such as the International Congress of Water Transportation and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. At these meetings, Midwestern scientists explicitly tied together the engineering difficulties of constructing a new waterway in the tropics to the economic growth of the Middle West. 

Environment, Science, and Development: The Moroccan Phosphate Industry from Protectorate to Independence (1912–1965)

Sunny Chen is a PhD candidate in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles where they are a student of Dr. Soraya de Chadarevian. Their research focuses on the history of mining, colonial infrastructure, environment, and decolonization in modern Morocco. Their research has been supported by the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.  

At the Linda Hall Library, they will examine the conversations of national, colonial, and international scientific communities (such as the Moroccan Society for Natural and Physical Science, Protectorate Office of Mines and Geology, and International Geological Congress) regarding Moroccan phosphate mining. By placing these conversations in dialogue with anti-imperial union militancy, they will explore the history of environmental and geochemical science as it transformed landscapes, communities, and the conditions of sovereignty in Morocco. 

Humans: A Monstrous History

Dr. Surekha Davies is a British historian of science, art, and ideas and the author of the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters. She has written essays and reviews on the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in publications that include the TLS, Nature, and Aeon. Prior to becoming a full-time author and speaker, she was a curator at The British Library Map Library and held faculty and postdoctoral positions in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands. Davies is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America, for which she serves as Fellowships Chair. 

At the Linda Hall Library, Davies will be completing her second book, HUMANS: A Monstrous History. From human rights to Hollywood, monsters have shaped how we think about the human condition. Davies analyzes how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. Ten chapters braid together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein’s monster, and E.T., and show how monster-making defines who gets to count as normal. HUMANS traces the long, volatile history of monster-making in order to chart a better path for the future. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters. 

During her fellowship, Davies will finalize chapters that explore how animals, extraterrestrials, and machines (robots, neural nets, artificial intelligence) have shaped the meaning of “human.” Linda Hall Library materials include John Wilkins’s The Discovery of a World in the Moone (London, 1638 and 1640) and works by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century naturalists and anthropologists (like Louis Agassiz, Robert Chambers, Charles Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), some of whose arguments fed directly into race science. She will also begin developing spinoff essays from the book for news and magazine outlets.  

New Trade Routes and the Globalization of Taste: Evidence from the Linda Hall Library’s Panama Canal Holdings

Bryce Evans is a historian of global foodways and Professor of Modern World History at Liverpool Hope University. His research focuses on connections between food consumption practices and transportation. The centuries-old Spice Routes were crucial to “opening up” food trade and cultures, but less attention has been paid to the role of pioneering trade routes in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Great engineering projects such as the Panama Canal transformed global trade and culture, ensuring the rapid transit of foodstuffs and further enhancing the globalization of taste. 

These trade routes preceded the intensification of those trends through the later aviation age and presaged the familiar chokepoints of today’s food distribution networks, transforming the possibilities of exchange and consumption while highlighting the vulnerability of global food security. Evans will use Linda Hall Library resources to shine a light on these dynamics, exploring themes of imperialism, progressivism, collaboration, and conflict through the lens of the transit of foodstuffs.  

Evans recently published a book on a related topic, Food and Aviation in the Twentieth Century, which was largely the product of US-based library fellowships and examined the role of Pan Am and other carriers in the globalization of taste. This project will pursue similar themes by positioning the construction of the Panama Canal as central to an earlier phase of this process. 

From Computing Centers to Computer Science: The Political Economy of American Universities and the Rise of Computing, 1930–1990

Sam Franz is a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the material conditions that enable and constrain the production and transmission of knowledge, intersecting with histories of science and technology, political economy, and histories of education. 

Sam's dissertation project explores the relationship between computing infrastructure and transformations in US universities in the twentieth century, focused on the American Midwest. In particular, he is interested in the way that questions about the future of work, the role of higher education in economic development, and the future of computing were intertwined in twentieth-century US history, from early statistics laboratories and calculating centers to modern computer science.  

A Prognostication Not-So-Everlasting: Shifting Attitudes towards Astrology in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Margaret Gaida is an independent scholar currently based in Pasadena, CA. Her research interests include the history of astronomy, astrology, optics, and magic in medieval and early modern Europe and the Islamic world, the materiality of texts and their relationship to instruments, and women’s history. Her first book project, The Lost Art of Arabic Astrology, examines the role of the Arabic astrological tradition in shaping the development of science in Europe. 

At the Linda Hall Library, Dr. Gaida will begin her second major research project, on the so-called “decline” of astrology in the seventeenth century. Despite its widespread popularity in medieval Europe and especially at courts and universities, by the middle of the eighteenth century, astrology was no longer pursued by members of scientific communities and emerging institutions, nor taught at universities. This was true despite the fact that astrology was not rigorously tested and shown to be false, a popular narrative for explaining why communities abandon scientific theories. At the same time, astrology continued to be practiced outside of these spaces by an enthusiastic public. Dr. Gaida will examine texts at the Linda Hall Library that represent both angles: the critiques of astrology and its defenses by practitioners, as well as its popularization outside of scientific communities such as the Royal Society in England and the Académie Royale in France. 

Converting Texts: The Modern Legacies of Renaissance Arabic Linguistics across the Mediterranean

Claire Gilbert is an Associate Professor of Early Modern History at Saint Louis University. She is the author of In Good Faith: Arabic Translation and Translators in Early Modern Spain, out from University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020, as well as articles and book chapters about the social history of translation and the political consequences of language contact in the Western Mediterranean. Her current research explores the history of language sciences in the early modern Mediterranean, with an emphasis on linguistic thought generated through contact between Arabic and Romance languages. 

At the Linda Hall Library, Gilbert will explore works which attest to language learning, translation, and other forms of cross-cultural exchange which underpinned the development of language sciences in European and Moroccan traditions. She will work with the Library’s holdings in Renaissance travel literature, scientific translations, and the publications of early scientific academies. 

Controversies and Uncertainties in the Building of AI. A Social History Approach

Ericka Herazo is a physicist with a master's degree in Sociology and History a PhD in History, and fifteen years of experience as a university adjunct professor.  Her research interests lie in social studies and the history of technology. Throughout her career, Herazo has explored various topics such as the history of electricity, electromagnetism, and the telegraph in Colombia, as well as the history of infrastructure and the history of X-ray computed tomography. 

In response to the ethical challenges and diverse debates surrounding the widespread implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), she is currently working on a project titled “Controversies and Uncertainties in the Building of AI: A Social History Approach.” This project involves reviewing the proceedings of various engineering societies' congresses in the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. Herazo’s aim is to uncover debates and controversies that can provide insights into the social construction of this technology. 

Kerosene Anti-monopoly: An Energy History of the Antitrust Movement against Standard Oil, 1846–1911

Minseok Jang is a PhD candidate studying environmental and business history at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His dissertation traces the global transition in artificial light during the late nineteenth century to provide an energy-centered and transnational history of the antitrust movement against Standard Oil, a monopolistic provider of kerosene distilled from petroleum. It analyzes the critical role of first-hand experiences with this new energy resource in shaping political actors’ perceptions of the corporation and the state, institutions that conflicted and cooperated to govern the energy transition.  

As a virtual fellow, he will examine how scientists, government officials, and businesspeople encountered kerosene in the US and Europe. Although kerosene provided an affordable light, it also brought about environmental risks, such as explosions of adulterated products and fires caused by misuse. Tracing how the actors coped with such challenges, he seeks to understand how the experiences with kerosene shaped their perception of Standard Oil’s monopoly.

The Discovery of the American Horticultural Miracle: A Study of American Horticulture by Yaroslav Nemets (1842–1898)

Olena Korzun is a doctor of history and a specialist in the history of agrarian science in Ukraine. She is an associate professor at the National Scientific Agricultural Library of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv). Her research focuses on the history of knowledge generation in scientific teams, their organizational evolution, and the analysis of social aspects of epistemology in modern agricultural sciences. Her PhD thesis (2010) studied the peculiarities of the regional development of agricultural experimentation in Ukraine, with a specific emphasis on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Podillya region. In 2020, she defended her Habilitation thesis, which studied the impact of crisis conditions on scientific and organizational aspects of agrarian science in Ukrainian territories during the Second World War. Her current research interests include the history of interethnic scientific cooperation in the agrarian sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and conducting prosopographical analyses of agrarian scientists of the Ukrainian diaspora (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2022; Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation, 2023-2024).  

At the Linda Hall Library, Korzun will conduct a comparative study of the development of horticulture and pomology in the United States, Canada, and the Russian Empire (using the example of the Ukrainian territories that were part of it) in the second half of the nineteenth century.  This research project is devoted to reconstructing the life and creative path of Yaroslav Nemets (1842-1898), his transnational persona, and his contributions to the development of scientific, educational, and public life in Ukraine during the second half of the nineteenth century. Its goal is the restoration of collective memory about this scientist, educator, and public figure in Ukraine and the Czech Republic.  

Based on the results of his expedition to the USA and Canada (1895), Nemets prepared the first comprehensive work in the Russian Empire devoted to the development of gardening in the United States and Canada. His analysis of the industry stimulated further studies of American horticulture in the Russian Empire and the subsequent application of American experience in the conditions of different regions of the empire. Nemets’s recommendations aimed to improve horticulture in the Russian Empire and laid the foundations for the structural development of horticultural experimentation in the country and, in particular, on Ukrainian lands. 

Canoes and Canals: A New History of Indigenous and Settler River-Power and Infrastructure in North America, 1600–1900

John Kuhn is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY-Binghamton, where he teaches, reads, and writes about the literature and history of early modern England and the Atlantic world. He is at work on a project that hopes to tell a new history of the birchbark canoe, a specific sub-type of canoe developed by Haudenosaunee and Algonquian groups over centuries in what is today the American Northeast and Midwest. This craft was distinguished by its extreme lightness, its adaptability and easy repair, its ability to be used in very shallow water, and its ease of portage. This native craft continued to be used by Indigenous groups throughout the early colonial period (and beyond) and was also eagerly adopted by Dutch, French, and English settlers, who became structurally dependent on it in North American rivers. This project focuses on the 250 years after European arrival, tracing the native craft’s use by both Indigenous and European communities and arguing that careful attention to it reveals a large-scale and ongoing collision between European and Indigenous models of conceptualizing and interacting with rivers. During his fellowship, Professor Kuhn will consult the Linda Hall Library’s extensive collection of materials relating to settler river infrastructure, transportation history, and canal-building projects. 

Overseas Travel of the Dolphin and Anchor: Aldines from the Collections of the Linda Hall Library

Tamara Kutsaieva is a scholar affiliated with the National Historical-Architectural Museum “The Fortress of Kyiv,” who completed a PhD in the history of Ukraine at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine). Since 2017, she has been studying fragments of private and institutional historical book collections, provenance marks, and ex libris bookplates in antiquarian volumes from the collections of Kyiv museums. Kutsaieva’s scientific interests are united by book studies, heritage studies, and the polyculture history of Ukraine (namely Judaica).  

Her current project explores the Aldines collection of the Linda Hall Library. It is a very special collection of books about fundamental research topics as well as a collection of rare books – objects of the material culture with their own individuality (e.g., provenance marks as symbols of reading habits). This project will track the understanding of the Aldines collection in many senses: attribution, art, and historical analysis; reconstruction of the history of the acquisition of the Aldines for the Linda Hall Library; and describing the Library’s interest in specific Aldines as sources of scientific knowledge. 

150 Years of Women in the IEEE, IRE, and AIEE

Allison Marsh combines her interests in engineering, history, and museums to tell stories of technology through historical artifacts. She likes to think of history as a Trojan horse to reach audiences who may not want to learn about tech. Her main research interests revolve around how the general public comes to understand complex engineering ideas, especially outside the classroom—through museums, documentaries, TV shows, and so on. She writes the monthly “Past Forward” column for IEEE Spectrum, and she was the consultant for the Crash Course History of Science series. She is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina where she is the co-director of the Ann Johnson Institute for Science, Technology & Society. Before coming to USC, she was curator and Winton M. Blount Research Chair at the Smithsonian Institution National Postal Museum. 

As the Linda Hall Library’s 2024-25 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, Marsh will comb through the former library of the United Engineering Society and the publications of the IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and its predecessor organizations, the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) and AIEE (American Institute of Electrical Engineers), to create a database of all of the women who contributed to these professional societies. This is a passion project for Marsh (who has been an IEEE member since her undergrad days) because while all the other major engineering disciplines have reached gender parity, electrical engineers remain stubbornly at 12% female. In advance of the upcoming 150th anniversary of the organization, she would like to create a digital visualization and an accompanying book to shine a light on the women who have always been there, yet who are rarely recognized. 

The Movement against Reductionism: An Artist’s Intervention in the Life Sciences, 1950–1980

Csaba Olasz is a historian of science whose research interests center on the many ways the life sciences and humanistic disciplines have come to interconnect. He received an MA in Comparative History with Science Specialization at Central European University and is now a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation project seeks to reconstruct Cold War philosophical-scientific debates related to reductionism, the belief that the behavior of complex systems can best be explained by studying the properties of their smallest components. 

His research at the Linda Hall Library and Clendening History of Medicine Library at the University of Kansas Medical Center examines the collections related to scientific controversies generated by American experimental psychologists and evolutionary theorists who embraced reductionist methods. The focus of his investigations is Arthur Koestler, a European public intellectual who led an international, antireductionist cohort of scholar-scientists. By situating Koestler in the middle of these debates, he seeks to determine the extent to which a minority voice of scientific dissent against the dehumanizing tendencies of reductionism gained traction and the consequences of that philosophical movement.

The Ontology of a Mixed-Race Woman

Myrna Perez is an Associate Professor at Ohio University, jointly appointed in Classics & Religious Studies and in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. She received her PhD from the Department of the History of Science from Harvard University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rice University and has been a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School and the Darwin Correspondence Project at Cambridge University. She is the co-editor of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2023) and author of Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024). Her audio lecture series “The History of Science, Sexuality and Medicine” is available via Audible and Apple Books. She is a series editor of Osiris, the annual thematic journal of the History of Science Society. 

At the Linda Hall Library, she plans to focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural history, microscopy, and race-science books and manuscripts as she works on her book, The Ontology of a Mixed-Race Woman (working title). The book centers on an 1862 Louisiana Supreme Court case, in which Alexina Morrison sued for her freedom from slavery by claiming that she was white. Also at the trial of Morrison v. White was John Leonard Riddell, who examined a strand of Alexina’s hair before the court. The book takes two moments at the trial— Alexia’s claim to whiteness and John’s examination of her hair— to unfold a set of related arguments about race, science, and citizenship in the emergence of American liberal democracy out of the racial grammar of British colonialism. 

Knowledge for Empire, Imperial Rivers: Legacies of Hydraulic Engineering Education in the United States, Britain, India, and Canada, 1850–1940

Ramya Swayamprakash is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University and an environmental historian of North America and South Asia.  She is exploring the emergence of a global assemblage of engineering expertise by comparing hydraulic and civil engineering education in India, Canada, the United States, and Britain from 1850 to 1940.  

Knowledge for Empire will trace the pedagogical and curricular roots of engineering drawing to reveal cross-cultural connections that will enable us to rethink knowledge formation, co-creation, as well as the making of global developmentalism. While engineering drawing and surveying enjoyed a global currency, they were also the outcome of different pedagogical contexts and were the basis of the performance of hydraulic engineering expertise across the world. Engineering education across these four locales was born out of different but overlapping reasons and causes. A comparative lens will allow us to understand how engineering pedagogy and curriculum fashioned a knowledge system that was global in impact, even if it was local in practice. Knowledge for Empire is interested in understanding how much the engineering curriculum, resultant visual vocabulary, and pedagogy impact how engineers envision nature, especially in a comparative context. 

Women in Medical Education and Science in the Second Half of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (On the Example of Odesa)

Olena Uvarova is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at Odesa National Medical University (Ukraine), where she teaches humanitarian courses and is the Chair of her department’s student scientific group. She graduated from the Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University in 2003 with an honors degree and obtained a PhD in World History in 2008. Her research interests include several topics: European international relations, the Greek community in Odesa, urban history, and the history of medical education. She was a guest lecturer at the “Multinational South of Ukraine” School, organized by DAAD (Odesa, 2021), the Society of Ukrainians in Finland (Helsinki, 2023), and the Branch of the Hellenic Foundation for Culture (Odesa, 2024). In August and September 2023, Dr. Uvarova was the Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki, Finland).  

In recent years, Uvarova has been teaching the History of Medicine, which piqued her interest in the understudied issue of the evolution of medical education and science in her home city. She is currently working on a new project dedicated to women’s medical and scientific education in Odesa city during the second half of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Her primary focus is the establishment and functioning of Higher Women's Medical Courses in Odesa. During her fellowship, Dr. Uvarova will consult the Library’s “Women in STEM” collection, as well as other works on the history of education and knowledge in medicine and related fields. This will help her conduct a comparative historical analysis that explores the divergence and overlaps between the educational systems of the Russian Empire, Western European countries, and the United States. This project will also try to identify female names in medicine throughout the study period. 

The Rise of the Atacama Desert: Exploration and Knowledge Production 1820–1880

Felipe Vilo Muñoz is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests encompass the circulation of knowledge in nineteenth-century Latin America. His current dissertation focuses on the exploration of the Atacama Desert from 1820 to 1880. His project delves into the knowledge production of naturalists and adventurers who described the region’s natural resources, biodiversity, and territorial boundaries to a growing audience in Chile, Europe, and the United States.  

At the Linda Hall Library, Vilo will examine and digitize a series of travelogues, diaries, and journals. Examining how the Atacama is presented in these sources will raise relevant questions about how arid places have been foundational in articulating circuits that enabled the exchange of goods and ideas and facilitated the emergence of intellectual, political, and industrial interests that contributed to modern globalization. 

Transitions by the Book: Print and the Remaking of Gender in Britain, 1745–1900

Carlisle Yingst is currently a lecturer on English at Harvard University, where they completed their PhD in 2023. Their research and teaching focus on British literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic period, book history and bibliography, histories of science and medicine, and gender and sexuality. Yingst’s writing has appeared, or is soon to appear, in Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, European Romantic Review, and Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation. They are currently working on two projects related to the history of the book in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, one that examines practices of collecting ephemeral media, and another that connects histories of print to histories of non-normative gender.  

While at the Linda Hall Library, Yingst will be working on the second project—tentatively titled Transitions by the Book: Print and the Remaking of Gender in Britain, 1745-1900—which offers a novel account of the classification of sex and construction of non-normative genders in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, by attending to the print forms in which such ideas of sex and gender-variance were disseminated, circulated, and preserved. This project brings together ongoing research in queer studies with recent work in book history that has shown how print’s physical forms shaped literary, historical, and scientific knowledge in the period this project covers. Ideas of sex and gender, this research demonstrates, are among those bodies of knowledge shaped by, in, and through print. As part of their ongoing research for this project, Yingst plans to trace how ideas of sex and gender shape bibliographical codes across a range of scientific and popular publications of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, including the Linda Hall Library’s extensive collections of periodicals and professional manuals.