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To give an idea of previous holders of the InterAmericas Fellowship, we include their projects:

2009-2010:  Carlo Célius

Dr. Célius is currently at the Center for the Study of Literature, Arts, and Traditions, Laval University in Québec, Canada, where he is an affiliated researcher.  His InterAmericas Fellowship began on October 1, 2009.  The title of his research project is “The Haitian Revolution and the Writing of History (1789-1830).”   He focuses on the period between the start of the revolutionary upheaval of 1789 and the debates on paying an indemnity to the former colonists by the new Haitian state in order to obtain the recognition of its independence by France (1820-1830).  This period witnessed the proliferation of a discourse that set off a crisis in the colonial historical narrative.  A shifting and diverse discourse that nonetheless seemed to be shaped by the problem of the loss of the colony, then later – when independence is achieved – by the problem of re-conquest.

Dr. Célius aims to delineate this discourse and link up two levels of analysis:  first to carve up the production of a historical discourse in the Revolutionary period in its form, contents and time frame, and then to historicize it.

2009-2010:  Kristen Block

Kristen Block is an Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University and is at the JCB Library for 9 months as a joint NEH/InterAmericas Fellow, beginning in the spring of 2010.  Her topic is “Faith and Fortune:  Religious Identity and the Politics of Profit in the Early Caribbean.

Her plan is to examine the intersection between religious allegiance and economic ambition on the volatile frontiers of the Caribbean over the long seventeenth century.  She hopes to employ four case studies to explore how ordinary individuals created and manipulated powerful religious affiliations.  She expects that this approach will personalize the history of Caribbean inequalities during an era of burgeoning capitalism in the early modern Atlantic, telling the stories of slaves, sailors, servants, and sectarians who made their lives and fortunes in the region’s profit-saturated cultural landscape.  For them, articulating a Christian identity was a political act, an important power negotiation, and a way to articulate injustice.   This will be Kristen’s second JCB Fellowship.

2008-2009:  Julie Kim

Dr. Julie Kim is an Assistant Professor at the Fordham University.  Her project is “Matters of Taste:  Economies of Food and Race in the Early Atlantic World.”  Julie postulates that the truism, ‘You are what you eat,” captures emerging notions of race in the early Atlantic world.  She intends to examine racial thinking in relation to the economies of tobacco, sugar, and other consumables driving Britain’s imperial expansion in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.  In addition to asserting the centrality of discourses of food to projects of cultural representation, she argues that the formation of race, as a literary process, was constantly open to interpretation and hence crucial to the emergence of anti-racisms, as well as racisms.

2008-2009:  Dr. Nicholas Dew

Professor Dew teaches at McGill University in the History Department.  His project, “Networks of Knowledge in the French Atlantic World, c. 1660-c.1730," explores the relationship between early modern science and colonialism, by re-examining French science from the perspective of the Atlantic expeditions organized by the Académie des Sciences in the period c. 1660-1670.  The Académie sent envoys to French colonial outposts in West Africa, Guiana, the Antilles, Louisiana and Canada, to carry out research in astronomy, cartography and geodesy, but also in ethnography and natural history.  Reconstructing these early expeditions will cast light on the processes by which European colonial trade networks redrew the map of Enlightenment Science.

Dew hopes to consolidate the research that he has done in the past with further research using the exceptionally strong holdings of the JCB in the history of the Atlantic World, and early modern navigation and cartography.  His goal is to add to the literature on the history of French science between 1650 and 1750 (a surprisingly under-researched field), and a contribution to the historiography of the Scientific Revolution and Early Enlightenment.  At the same time, he will attempt to cast light on the broader problem of the connections between the cultural and intellectual history of Europe and the development of the colonial world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A book written by Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France, is due to come from Oxford University Press shortly.  In addition, he edited with James Delbourgo, Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008). 

2006-2007:  Dr. Wim Klooster

Professor Wim Klooster, Clark University, Department of History, came to the JCB Library as a long-term fellow in September of 2006.  His fellowship was jointly supported by the Reed Foundation (InterAmericas) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  His focus was “Revolutions in the Atlantic World:  A Comparative History”.  He gave a JCB Fellows luncheon talk called From France via Haiti to the Rio de la Plata:  The Story of a Marquis Caught Up in the Age of Revolutions in which he revealed the remarkable story of a wine-producing French marquis who witnessed the start of the French Revolution as a politician, enlisted in a British regiment that saw action in rebellious St. Domingue, and eventually became Napoleon’s envoy to the tumultuous towns of Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

This was Prof. Klooster’s second visit to the JCB.  He also enjoyed a Vietor Fellowship at the Library in 1995-1996 when his focus was on Smuggling and Law Enforcement in the Americas:  Spanish and English Colonial Trade Compared, 1650-1750. 

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