2021-2022 Long-Term Fellows End-of-Year Symposium

Join us for an end-of-year symposium celebrating the scholarship and achievements of the Library & Museum's 2021-2022 cohort of long-term fellows!

The event will take place on Thursday, June 23, from 1:00-4:00 p.m. ET, with a short-break between sessions. A full schedule, including individual paper titles and abstracts, is below. All times are listed in Eastern Standard Time.

1:00 p.m.: Introductory Remarks, Adrianna Link (Head of Scholarly Programs)

1:10 - 2:10 p.m.: Session One: New Perspectives from the Collections of the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society

Sean Gallagher (David Center for the American Revolution Postdoctoral Fellow), “The David Center Collections as an Archive of Black Experience”

This talk explores how the David Center's microfilm and manuscript collections can be used to research histories of slavery and race in early America. While Sol Feinstone founded the David Library to support research on the American Revolution's political and military leaders, I show how those same collections offer a window into Black people's experiences of slavery, freedom, and community in the Atlantic World.

Nicole Breault (David Center for the American Revolution Predoctoral Fellow), "Contests of Empire: Researching Occupied Boston in the David Library Collection"

In the spring of 1774, the Coercive Acts closed the port of Boston to trade and dissolved the chartered rights of the province of Massachusetts. General Thomas Gage arrived in Boston Harbor on May 15, 1774, accompanied by four regiments. Boston was once again occupied by the British Army. My dissertation “The Night Watch of Boston: Law and Governance in Eighteenth-Century British America” draws on a neglected collection of eighteenth-century night constables’ reports to illuminate the role of local-level policing in the development of an early American city and the context of an empire in crisis. This paper will highlight the sixth chapter of the dissertation, “Contests of Empire: Policing During the Second Occupation of Boston,” and reflect on the David Library sources that I used while on fellowship. I will conclude with some thoughts on the larger project, as well as future questions I plan to explore on local-level policing and occupation in eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

2:10 - 2:30 p.m.: Break

2:30 - 4:00 p.m.: Session Two: Health, Labor, and Heritage: Reflecting on a Year of Research at the APS and Beyond

Molly Nebiolo (Friends of the APS Predoctoral Fellow in Early American History (to 1840)), “Waterways, Miasmas, and Complicated Ideas of Healthiness in Early American Cities”

In this presentation, I will discuss research on the third chapter of my dissertation, “Constructing Health: Concepts of Well-Being in the Early Atlantic World,” which looks at how healthiness took on a unique definition when it came to miasmas, disgust, and living near urbanizing waterways in the eighteenth century.

Anabelle Rodríguez (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) Predoctoral Fellow), “‘Curating Xunantunich’ in the Archive”

In the first half of this presentation, I will present an illustrated overview of my dissertation project, “Curating Xunantunich: Preserving Maya Cultural-Natural Heritage in Western Central Belize.” In the second half I will delve into current research carried out at three of Philadelphia’s premier research centers: the American Philosophical Society's Library & Museum, The Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Penn Museum Archives.

Rebecca Jackson (John C. Slater Predoctoral Fellow in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine), “‘Homogametically Yours, Virginia Apgar and the Labor of Women in Science”

In this presentation, I explore how Virginia Apgar navigated a scientific and medical world full of “heterogametes,” as she playfully termed a male colleague in her correspondence. I tour a few favorites of my APS archive finds related to Apgar’s work and her path away from academic research and towards becoming Director of the Division of Congenital Malformations at The National Foundation. I also detail some of the new questions this research has led me to pursue regarding her eponymous APGAR Score, to be explored in my dissertation work on patient-centric clinical measurement.

The event is free of charge, but registration is required to attend. Please register for each session separately.

1:00 - 2:10 p.m. ET: Session One: New Perspectives from the Collections of the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society

2:30 - 4:00 p.m. ET: Session Two: Health, Labor, and Heritage: Reflecting on a Year of Research at the APS and Beyond

Nicole Breault (David Center for the American Revolution Predoctoral Fellow) is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut. Her dissertation “The Night Watch of Boston: Law and Governance in Eighteenth-Century British America” undertakes the first comprehensive study of watch-keeping in early America. The project assembles and analyzes nearly three hundred reports written by night watch constables in colonial and revolutionary Boston to examine the legal, social, and cultural dimensions of setting a watch. She argues that watch-keeping was a multi-dimensional method of governance and surveillance fundamental to authority and state formation at the local level, and essential to the administration and economies of early American cities. This study deepens our understanding of how crisis and revolution affected local structures and offers new insights on the long trajectory of how policing was conducted and delimited. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the American Historical Association, the Boston Athenæum, the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut, and the Huntington Library.

Sean Gallagher (David Center for the American Revolution Postdoctoral Fellow) received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis (2021). His manuscript "Slaves of the Revolution: Enslaved Public Labor in the War for Independence" examines enslaved people's experiences of confiscation, impressment, and military labor during the American Revolution. He has published his research in the Journal of Southern History, Slavery & Abolition, and the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, Black Perspectives."

Rebecca Jackson (John C. Slater Predoctoral Fellow in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine) is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Indiana University – Bloomington (IU-B), with particular interest in clinical measurement methodology and history and philosophy of measurement more broadly. Her dissertation, Measuring ‘Well’: Clinical Measuring Practices and Philosophy of Measurement, focuses on four cases of successful patient-centric and non-standard clinical measuring practices from the 19th century to current debates. Her educational background includes an MA in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine and graduate Minor in Statistics from IU-B, and a dual BA in Mathematics and Creative Writing from Ball State University. Her first publication, on the history of the “drop” as a fluid unit in the 19th century, will be featured in Perspectives on Science (Nov. 2021). She has presented her work at professional conferences in Canada, US, France, and Czechia, and looks forward to presenting in Milan next summer at the Measurement at the Crossroads conference.

Molly Nebiolo (Friends of the APS Predoctoral Fellow in Early American History (to 1840)) is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University. Her dissertation project, “Constructing Health: Concepts of Well-Being in the Early Atlantic World”, looks at practices and definitions of public health in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century early American city-spaces (Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah). She is interested in the intersection of health, urbanizing spaces, and early American history. She also considers herself a digital humanist, and, most recently, worked on mapping the 1721-1722 smallpox epidemic in Boston for the Historic Epidemics project at Northeastern University. Molly also has a great affection for ice cream, camping, and running.

Anabelle Rodríguez (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative Predoctoral Fellow) is an artist/curator/educator from Puerto Rico and a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University. Her dissertation is titled Curating Xunantunich and it is based on fieldwork and archival research related to the preservation of culture and nature at the Xunantunich Archaeological Reserve, a popular tourist attraction in Belize, Central America. Before joining Rutgers, Anabelle curated exhibitions for alternative art spaces, cultural organizations, educational institutions, and government agencies in Philadelphia and New York City. She is the founder of an independent research platform called The ~curARTorial LAB and her current interests include: art + anthropology; anthropologies and sociologies of art; art as craft/craft as art; art law and repatriation; Caribbean archaeology and Indigenous identities; cultural imperialisms and (de)coloniality; experimental ethnographies; feminist, queer, and Indigenous art histories; the illicit traffic of global antiquities; natureculture preservation; peripheral art worlds; problematic archives and collections; sacred sites and heritages; visual research methodologies.