The New-York Historical Society has announced five fellowship recipients for the 2012-2013 academic year. New-York Historical offers fellowships to scholars dedicated to understanding and promoting American history. Basing their work on New-York Historical’s museum and library collections of more than 350,000 books, three million manuscripts, and collections of maps, photographs, prints, art objects and ephemera documenting the history of America from the perspective of New York, these scholars extend and enrich their previous work to develop new publications that illuminate complex issues of the past.

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow

Kevin Butterfield, currently Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma, is the 2012-2013 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Butterfield received a Ph.D. in History in 2010 from Washington University in St. Louis. He is an active member of his profession who has published articles and reviews in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, and Common-Place, as well as the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He has been a Gilder Lehrman Fellow at the New-York Historical Society (2006) and has won numerous fellowships and awards. His research project, an expansion of his dissertation, is entitled “Membership in America: Law and Voluntary Association in the Early Republic.”

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowships

Andrew C. Lipman, Assistant Professor of History, Syracuse University, received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, in 2010. Lipman, who will develop his dissertation, “The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Colonization of Long Island Sound,” while in residence, has also published in the journals William and Mary Quarterly and Early American Studies. An experienced tour guide in Philadelphia, he has also reviewed books for scholarly journals and taken part in professional activities in his field.

Robin Cheyne Vandome is currently a Lecturer in American Intellectual and Cultural History in the Department of American and Canadian Studies, the University of Nottingham, U.K. He received a Ph.D. in the Faculty of History, Cambridge University in 2005 and has been a doctoral exchange student the Boston University. His 2012-2013 project at the New-York Historical Society will be the conversion of his dissertation into a book manuscript, provisionally entitled The Romance of Knowledge: American Endeavors in the Natural and Human Sciences, 1850-1900. An intellectual history of the development of attitudes toward science in the late nineteenth century, the work will draw on the resources of the New-York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library in a variety of fields.

Bernard & Irene Schwartz Fellowships

Dael A. Norwood, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Princeton University, expects his degree in the spring of 2012. His dissertation, “Trading in Liberty: The Politics of the American China Trade, c. 1784-1862” investigates the relationship between trade with China and its impact on the politics of slavery, states’ rights, commerce and global relations. His work at the New-York Historical Society will draw heavily on the resources of the Naval History Society collection and the papers of Gustavus Fox, as well as family papers, logbooks, correspondence, and printed materials from the early nineteenth-century. Mr. Norwood has made many scholarly presentations and comes with strong recommendations from his dissertation advisers.

Catherine McNeur expects to receive her Ph.D. from Yale University in the summer of 2012. Her background in urban design and architecture studies, the subject of her undergraduate major at New York University has contributed to her current work, “The ‘Swinish Multitude’ and Fashionable Promenades: Battles over Public Space in New York City, 1815-1865.” By exploring how the struggle to define public spaces in the city during a period of rapid expansion affected the lives and livelihoods of New Yorkers, McNeur hopes to demonstrate how the decisions made during these years had an impact on subsequent urban planning and city life. Her work will draw on the resources of the Children’s Aid Society, the papers of John Randel, Jr., and documents relating to the development of the Croton Aqueduct and Central Park as well as related materials. McNeur has published in the Journal of Urban History, Louisiana History, and Common-place and has acted as a teaching fellow at Yale.

Fellowship positions at the New-York Historical Society are made possible by the generous support of Bernard & Irene Schwartz, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. All fellows receive research stipends while in residency- Bernard & Irene Schwartz Fellows each teach two courses at The New School during their year as resident scholars.