The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for the 2026 – 2027 Research Travel Grant Programs, offering awards of up to $1,500 to support research projects associated with the following collecting Centers, subject areas, and collection holdings:
Archive of Documentary Arts General Grant
Archive of Documentary Arts Sidney Gamble Travel Grant
Doris Duke Foundation Travel Grant
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grant
Harry H. Harkins, Jr. T’73 Travel Grant
History of Medicine Collections
Human Rights Archive
John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Mary Lily Research Grants)
Anyone whose research would be supported by resources from the Rubenstein Library’s research centers is eligible to apply. We encourage applications from students at any level of education; faculty and teachers; visual and performing artists; writers; filmmakers; public historians; and independent researchers.
For assistance determining the eligibility of your project, please contact AskRL@duke.edu with the subject line “Travel Grants.”
Eligibility
Applicants must reside beyond a 100-mile radius of Durham, N.C., and may not be current Duke students or employees.
Information Session
An online information session will be held Wednesday, January 14, 2026, 2-3 PM EST. This program will review application requirements, offer tips for creating a successful application, and include an opportunity for attendees to ask questions of staff involved with the travel grant program. This information session will be recorded and posted online afterwards. You can register for the session here.
Timeline
The deadline for application will be Friday, February 27, at 8:00 PM EST. Decisions will be announced by the end of April 2026 for travel during May 2026 – June 2027. Awards are paid as reimbursements for personal expenses after completion of the research visit(s).
Post contributed by Michael Ortiz-Castro, PhD, Lecturer, Department of History, Bentley University. Micheal was a recipient of the John Hope Franklin Research Center Travel Grant & Elon Clark History of Medicine Travel Grant.
Life insurance seems, perhaps, like one of the duller aspects of adulthood. For late 19th century Americans, life insurance represented and marshalled a number of concerns and anxieties about value, life, and community. Coming to force in the mid to late 1800s, life insurance—acquiring it, maintaining it, using it, and its meaning—all intertwined with questions about race, nation, and community—not surprising given that life insurance dealt with some of the most intimate aspects of individuals’ lives—their health, the health of their families, and the economic and social wellbeing.
As a historian of citizenship, my research discusses the history of life insurance as part of a broader analysis of the transformation of ideas of citizenship in the wake of the civil war. My book project, presently titled Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in Post-Reconstruction America, discusses life insurance in the context of the language companies used to sell policies to Americans, how folks in and outside the industry discussed the business of calculating the value of human lives, and the industry’s associated practices. These practices had a vision of citizenship yoked to ideas of biology and racial purity and helped shape the culture of life insurance—which would come to center round keywords like race, family, and citizen. At its intellectual heart was a project of racial differentiation, materialized in Irving Hoffman’s “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro”. Written in his capacity as Statistician for the Prudential Life Insurance Company, the tract used mortality rates to not only advocate for denying insurance policies to black Americans, but to popularize the “extinction thesis”, a theory that black Americans were simply biologically unfit for equality.
What did black Americans make of this evolving discourse? With the generous support of the History of Medicine Collections and the John Hope Franklin Research Center at the Rubenstein Library, I began to answer this question by consulting the records of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest black-owned life insurance company in the nation. Their records highlight the complicated place of black life insurance companies in the economic landscape; they highlight the complicated ways in which black Americans sought to both prove their fitness for citizenship and resist the terms that condemned death to permanent exclusion.
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Black life insurance companies like North Carolina Mutual grew in a lacuna. The first black insurance companies came up to help black Americans cover funeral costs; North Carolina Mutual marketed itself as a life-oriented project; like other life insurance companies, the stated goal of North Carolina Mutual was to “help Negroes … accumulate … a fortune in life”, to make burial insurance unnecessary. Though life insurance companies faced significant headwinds in their early days due to the perceived sacrilege of putting a value to human life, they participated in and benefitted from a cultural transformation that saw it worthwhile to invest in one’s own life.
North Carolina Mutual’s insistence that black lives could yield value for the user was complicated for two reasons. The first reason was that, according to white insurers, black lives were too risky to include in the risk pool—better to keep them out, for no value or benefit could be generated for the community. In constructing their own risk pool, North Carolina Mutual posited a different vision of the community. However, the notion that black lives could yield value for their owner drew eerie parallels to the slave insurance policies of the antebellum era—it had been commonplace for owners to ensure the lives of their slaves and receive payment in the case of death. In attempting to both affirm and challenge the prevailing association between value, appreciation, and race, North Carolina Mutual affirmed that black lives were appreciable assets—and could be a boon when that wealth was owned by the individual themselves. This logic seems to have been a motivating factor for other black-owned business companies—for example, as seen below, the Atlanta Life Insurance Company similarly sold its mission as “a dream to develop economic independence” among black Americans.
North Carolina Mutual insisted on more than just that black lives could be considered appreciable assets. At the heart of their industry was the assumption that black lives were insurable to begin with—that is to say, a good risk. To do so, it had to assert that black lives were not, say, any riskier than white customers. One bulletin from Clyde Donnell, the Medical Director, makes the logic clear. An excerpt of the document, which discussed tuberculosis mortality rates among black Americans, can be seen below. Below that, you can see another piece, also written by Donnell, which discusses the issue of finding enough black Americans to ensure.
The doctor’s argument in both documents once more ambivalently positions black American’s health to that of their white counterparts. White insurance executives, like Hoffman, argued that high mortality rates across diseases between black and white Americans was indicative of innate biological inferiority. Black intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois often tried to argue that these disparities were the result of racist measurements and biases; in his magisterial The Health and Physique of the Negro American, DuBois used modern sociological methods to prove that, in aggregate, mortality rates were consistent across race according to class. This was not the strategy of North Carolina Mutual—they affirmed the notion that black folks did in fact have higher mortality rates. However, rather than cast these higher mortality rates as evidence of biological inferiority, Dr. Donnell instead asserts that this means that white folk should become more invested in the uplift of black Americans—“the negro means much to the economic welfare of the southern white man”. In the latter, Donnell references the environmental factors DuBois preferred while maintaining the fact of disparate health outcomes according to race. In tying their destinies together, Donnell’s logic resisted the idea that a white America was the inevitable result.
As materially important as it was for black Americans to have access to life insurance and the financial means to support themselves through death and emergencies, like other life insurance companies, North Carolina Mutual understood that its project was not just about securing the financial wellness of its members—no, the goal was to secure the political and economic uplifting of the people
This can be seen below, where the writings double as political mission: “it is better not to have lived, than to have lived and not contributed anything to the success of any one else’s life”.
At the time of its founding, North Carolina Mutual found itself serving a community that had achieved massive cultural victories alongside the entrenchment of Jim Crow in the South. As a business that believed in racial uplift, it relied on the language of progress and assimilation evinced by leading intellectuals by Booker T Washington. However, as a business oriented towards the advancement of black Americans in the face of racism, it had to take a stand on discourses of racial inferiority. Life insurance singularly combined questions of individual health and the future of the community that animated many of the driving cultural transformations of the late 19th century—the records of NC Mutual prove useful in understanding how black Americans navigated their place in the nation, and how the fight for equality extended to the domain of health, wellness, and the everyday.
The Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025-2026 travel grants. Our research centers annually award travel grants to students, scholars, and independent researchers through a competitive application process. We extend a warm congratulations to this year’s awardees. We look forward to meeting and working with you!
The travel grants for the Archive of Documentary Arts and Human Rights Archive have been paused for the 2025-2026 cycle.
Doris Duke Archives
Joan Marie Johnson, Northwestern University, “Doris Duke and the Business of Philanthropy”
Richard Treut, “Doris Duke’s Stewardship of Duke Farms”
Elon Clark History of Medicine Travel Grants
Jessica Brabble, Ph.D. Candidate, College of Willilam & Mary, “Her Best Crop: Eugenics, Agricultural Programming, and Child Welfare, 1900-1964”
Michael Ortiz-Castro, Lecturer, Department of History, Bentley University, “Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in the Post-Reconstruction US.”
John Hope Franklin Research Center
Irene Ahn, Faculty, American University, “Bridging Divides through Local Reparations: Examining How Communities Repair Racial Injustices”
Emmanuel Awine, Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins University, “The Socio-Political History of the Raided Communities in Northern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso 1800-2000”
Carlee Migliorisi, M.A. Candidate, Monmouth University, “Asbury Park Uprising: Race, Riots, and Revenue”
Maria Montalvo, Faculty, Emory University, “Imagining Freedom”
Michael Ortiz, Faculty, Bentley University, “Acts of Citizenship: Belonging and Biology in the Post Reconstruction US”
Summer Perritt, Ph.D. Candidate, Rice University, “A Southern Reclamation: Understanding Black Identity and Return Migration to the American South in the Post-Civil Rights Era, 1960-2020”
McKenzie Tor, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Missouri, “The Black Temperance Movement in Nineteenth Century America”
Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
John Furr Fellowship for JWT Research
Raffaella Law, “Global Branding, Local Tastes: Nestle and the Rise of Internet-Age Food Advertising in the 1990s”
Joseph Semkiu, “Wartime Advertising and Radio Voices: Selling Masculinity On and Off the Radio to the 1940s US Home Front”
Alvin A. Achenbaum Travel Grants
James Bowie, “The 20th-Century Development of the Logo as a Cultural Object”
Bryce Evans, “Marketing Abundance: JWT’s Creative and Strategic Approach to the Pan Am Account”
Townsend Rowland, “Supplementation, Radiation, Mutation: Food and Scientific Authority in Postwar America”
Mark Slater, “Big Tobacco and Blackness: American Advertising, Black Culture, and Cigarettes in Post-WW2 America”
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture Travel Grant Awardees
Mary Lily Travel Grant
Daniel Belasco, Independent Researcher, Al Held Foundation, “Total Revolution: The Origins of the Feminist Art Movement, 1963-1969”
Ayumi Ishii and Kate Copeland, Independent Researchers, Pacific Northwest College of Art, “Compleat and Infallible Recipes”
Chloe Kauffman, Graduate Student, University of Maryland, College Park, “’If women are curious, women also like to speak’: Unmarried Women, Sexual Knowledge, and Female Mentorship in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Atlantic”
Lucy Kelly, Graduate Student, University of Sussex, Sussex Center for American Studies, “’I want to fight the fight. I want my rightful place’: Queer Worldmaking in the American South, 1970-2000”
Lina-Marie Murillo, Faculty, University of Iowa, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and History, “The Army of the Three and the Untold History of America’s Abortion Underground”
Melissa Thompson, Graduate Student, West Virginia University, “Redefining and Recreating the Meaning of Family, 1929 – 2010s”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grant
Stephanie Clare, Faculty, University of Washington, Seattle, “Eve’s Pandas: Queer Futurity and the More-Than-Human”
Julien Fischer, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Stanford University, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, “Writing the Incurable: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on Love and the Impossible”
Post contributed by Baylee Staufenbiel, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Florida State University.
During my recent research visit to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, I had the opportunity to work with the Duke University’s extensive holdings on medieval and early modern medicine. The highlight of my trip was Latin MS 182, a copy of the Pantegni Practica, a foundational medical text traditionally attributed to Constantine the African. The Pantegni is particularly significant as it one of the most comprehensive and well-known texts to synthesize Greco-Roman and Arabic medical knowledge. The Practica is interesting as it was never completed by Constantine. Various copies appeared, but current scholarship is unsure of the provenance of the additional chapters. The Rubenstein’s copy has some of these chapters that may have been compiled or written by his pupil Joannes Afflacius, who’s attribution is given to the accompanying treatise Liber Aureus. Figure One shows the table of contents of the Rubenstein’s Practica (33r).
Figure One: Pantegni Practica, 33r, Latin MS 182, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
As I worked with the Pantegni Practica, I really began to think about the roles of translators, manuscripts, prints, and productions. Constantine’s contribution to the spread of Arabic texts is undeniable. I have begun to think locations like Monte Cassino and Salerno as more than places of translation and transmission of texts. They are nodes for the establishment of epistemic authority. The texts, knowledges, and individuals that came from these locations constructed what would become medical and anatomical practice throughout the medieval and early modern periods.
The reliance on authoritative voices continued with my exploration of early modern sources. For example, in “On the Liver” (Sec. A Box 183, 1654-1677, England), I saw a compelling look at how seventeenth-century physicians balanced classical authority with contemporary anatomical findings. A Latin paragraph detailing liver striation was followed by an extensive English letter discussing Hippocrates, Galen, and early modern physicians’ beliefs about the structure and function of the liver. Shown in Figure Two, this text demonstrates the enduring influence of ancient medical models, even as new anatomical observations complicated long-held theories. The discussion of Rufus of Ephesus (70-110 CE) and Schenckius (likely Johannes Schenck von Grafenberg, 1530-1598) reinforced how early modern practitioners continued to situate their work alongside pre-existing medical authorities. The letter references humoral theory mentioning the relative temperature of the liver as well as the questions about its role in conception (notably Galen saw the liver, heart, and brain as the seat of the natural, animal, and vital souls respectively). As my research is focused on perceptions of the uterus, reading a meditation on the function of a specific organ further suggests that understandings of the internal body were constantly in flux, even for a well discussed structure like the liver.
Figure Two: “On the Liver,” David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University
My time at the Rubenstein Library was an incredible privilege. The collection provided invaluable access to texts that shaped medieval and premodern understandings of medicine and the body. Engaging with these manuscripts firsthand enriched my assessment and evaluation of these texts in my current research project. I am deeply grateful to the Rubenstein staff, curators, and archivists who made this trip possible.
Contributed by Dartricia Rollins, Visiting Librarian for Oral History at Emory University, Rose Library, and former Assistant Director of Charis Books and More.
With support from the Mary Lily Research Travel Grant program, I visited the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, and the Rubenstein Library, to spend time researching the Charis Books and More and Charis Circle collection. This allowed me to extend the digital campaign I started with my co-worker Saisha Gupta in 2023, “You Had to Be There,” into the Charis 50th celebration campaign in 2024, “take root among the stars.”
In early 2023, Saisha and I had the idea to highlight Charis’s history as “women’s history” for Women’s History Month in March. This required the quick and dedicated work of the archivists in the Rubenstein Library to locate and digitize dozens of Charis photos. In that process one photo stood out to us most: Octavia E. Butler, the author of many speculative fiction novels, most famously The Parable of the Sower.
Octavia Butler signs copies of her book Blood Child and Other Stories for eager readers at a table in Charis Books and More, Atlanta, GA, c. 1995. From the Charis Books and More and Charis Circle records, Rubenstein Library.
One thing to know about one of Charis’s current co-owners, Sara Look, is that Sara has the longest history with Charis, is meticulous, and likes to be accurate! So, when we tried to narrow down the dates for when Butler visited Charis, this became a year-long question.
I promise I am going somewhere with this.
This is what we knew for sure: Sara had in her possession a copy of Kindred: The 25th Anniversary edition, signed to Charis and we had photographic evidence of Butler being present in the store, but no date on the photo. Even after a phone call to co-founder Linda Bryant no one could remember the year, let alone the exact date of when the photo was taken. So, we decided that it was in the early 2000s based on the signed book.
When Sara and I visited the archives at the end of August 2024, our goal was to find photos of the many people who have contributed their love and talents to Charis over the years. We wanted to reflect on the almost 50 years of programming that has made Charis one of the most important queer and feminist cultural institutions in the South, and we wanted to share these memories and images back with not only the staff but the community in the form of postcards as keepsakes at our 50th celebration in November 2024.
What we found was that and so much more! As we pored over the hundreds of program flyers we found one that dated Octavia E. Butler’s first visit in 1995 in celebration of her book Blood Child and Other Stories! Discovering the 1995 Blood Child program flyer was exciting because it answered our question about Butler’s first visit to Charis and reinforced our decision to use the quote from Parable of the Sower as our 50th anniversary theme. But it also amplified the story we wanted to tell about our 50th theme: “take root among the stars,” a quote which comes from Butler’s prescient novel Parable of the Sower.
“We chose this invocation from Butler because it dares us to change the world. It dares us to struggle through scarcity and collapse, to build community with the tools available to us, and to imagine a future that is only possible with our people alongside us” (From Charis Turns 50).
My visit to the archive reminded me that our past is very much connected to our future and that it is always a good time to riffle through old documents as we fortify ourselves for our tomorrow. This photo is now part of the Charis lore and, “you [really just] had to be there” to get it.
Post contributed by Tessel Veneboer, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University.
Veneboer received a Mary Lily Research Travel Grant, 2023-2024. This piece is excerpted and adapted from Veneboer’s longer piece “Bad Sex,” published in Extra Intra Reader 3: Swallowed Like a Whole, which was edited by Rosie Haward, Clémence Lollia Hilaire and Harriet Foyster, (Gerrit Rietveld Academie & Sandberg Instituut, 2024).
As part of my doctoral research, I spent four weeks at Duke University studying the Kathy Acker Papers and other collections at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture. I work on the relationship between sex and literary form. In particular, the question of the optimism-pessimism divide among feminists about the givenness of the sexual imagery under patriarchy: the pornographic imagination. After sharing my interests with Kelly Wooten, archivist at the Sallie Bingham Center, she suggested I look at the archives of several anti-pornography activists including Dorothy “Cookie” Teer. This diversion from the Acker papers went on to consume much of my research time as I became more and more absorbed in the anti-pornography materials.
Flipping through newspaper clippings, personal correspondence, logistics for conferences and teach-ins, drafts of lectures and manifestos in the Teer Papers, I began to see that disagreements among feminists over the role of pornography, sexual violence, and censorship are not only part of a dispute about what feminists want or should want from sex, but contain perhaps a more fundamental disagreement: the definition of “sex” itself. Is sexuality simply an activity that should and can be reimagined by feminists or should we analyse sex as part of human nature, that is: as subjectivity itself? And if the latter, can there be any authenticity of sexual desire for women in a patriarchal society?
Among the anti-porn materials in the archive, I found an extensively annotated draft of a paper titled ”Sex Resistance in Heterosexual Arrangements.” A manifesto of sorts, the paper was authored by the Southern Women’s Writing Collective, alternatively known as Women Against Sex (WAS). The WAS group was closely affiliated with Women Against Pornography (WAP) who were active in New York City, under the wings of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon. The WAS group met WAP in 1987 at the “Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism” conference at New York University, where WAS presented their manifesto for the first time.
“The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism: A Full Day Conference” poster (1987), Dorothy “Cookie” Teer Papers, Rubenstein Library.
The advertising poster of the conference asks: “Who are the sexual liberals? What are they doing to feminism? Why do they defend pornography? What do they mean by ‘freedom’?” In the manifesto, the WAS members make a case against the pro-sex attitude that aims to rethink and reclaim female sexuality by emphasising the multiplicity of pleasures. To simply change the representation of sexuality does not resolve the association of sex with subordination for the WAS group. For them, sex-positive feminism follows a patriarchial logic that naturalises sexuality as an animalistic force and thus can keep women “under the spell” of sexuality. Women Against Sex asks: what if we resist compulsory sexuality?
The conference materials in the archive contain many drafts and internal disagreements over the WAS manifesto, but the rationale is clear: the only function of sex is the subordination of women and therefore “the practice of sexuality” must be resisted. This “sex resistance” movement aligns with Valerie Solanas’s proposal in the S.C.U.M. manifesto to create an “unwork force” of women who will take on jobs in order not to work at the job, to work slowly, or to get fired. To engage in ‘”sex resistance” is to refuse the idea that woman is, before all else, a sexual being who must realise the potential to enjoy sex. In the manifesto WAS proposes two alternatives: feminist celibacy and “deconstructive lesbianism.” They emphasize the difference between religious celibacy–the “vow”–and celibacy as politicized by feminist thought:
She resists on three fronts: she resists all male-constructed sexual needs, she resists the misnaming of her act as prudery and she especially resists the patriarchy’s attempt to make its work of subordinating women easier by consensually constructing her desire in its own oppressive image.[i]
WAS adds that, historically, women have long been practising deconstructive lesbianism and radical celibacy. For example, when a woman temporarily abstains from sex after sexual assault or when women live together without being sexually involved. This sex resistance paper thus argues that feminist celibacy is not new but that this type of abstinence has not been politicised as sabotage.
In a letter to Women Against Pornography, a WAS member explains that the disturbing nature of sex–-what they call woman’s “self-annihilation” as the social paradigm of our sexuality–-is in fact the definition of sex: if it doesn’t subordinate women it’s not sex. This claim is strangely close to queer theorist Leo Bersani’s proposal in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) that sexuality destabilizes any coherent sense of self as the boundaries between self and other are disturbed. Both Dworkin and Bersani refuse to romanticise sex and, as such, denaturalise sex.
The argument for radical celibacy in the “Sex resistance in heterosexual arrangements” article was ambivalently received at the 1987 conference hosted by Women Against Pornography in New York City. WAP member Dorchen Leidholdt, for example, writes to WAS that she fears the sex resistance proposal would undermine the credibility of the anti-pornography movement as a whole. Andrea Dworkin, however, was intrigued by the politicized celibacy which she found “more radical” than her own proposal to ban all pornography. Only without compulsory heterosexuality, it would be possible to restore, make whole again, what Dworkin calls the ”compromised metaphysical privacy” of woman.
[i] Southern Women’s Writing Collective (Women Against Sex), ‘Sex Resistance in Heterosexual Arrangements’, Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, New York & London, Teachers College Press, 1990.
Archive of Documentary Arts Sidney Gamble Travel Grants
Doris Duke Foundation Research Travel Grants
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Travel Grants
History of Medicine Collections
Human Rights Archive
John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Mary Lily Research Grants)
Anyone whose research would be supported by sources from the Rubenstein Library’s research centers is eligible to apply. We encourage applications from students at any level of education; faculty and teachers; visual and performing artists; writers; filmmakers; public historians; and independent researchers.
For assistance determining the eligibility of your project, please contact AskRL@duke.edu with the subject line “Travel Grants.”
Eligibility
Applicants must reside beyond a 100-mile radius of Durham, N.C., and may not be current Duke students or employees.
Information Session
An online information session will be held Wednesday, January 15, 2025, 2-3 pm EST. This program will review application requirements, offer tips for creating a successful application, and include an opportunity for attendees to ask questions. This program will be recorded and posted online afterwards. Register for the session here.
Timeline
The deadline for applications will be Friday, February 28, 2025, at 6:00 pm EST.
Decisions will be announced by the end of April 2025 for travel during May 2025-June 2026. Awards are paid as reimbursement after completion of the research visit(s).
Post contributed by Matilde Manara, Postdoc Fellow at Institut Lethica, Université de Strasbourg, France. Manara received an Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grant, 2023-2024.
I approached the materials held in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Papers as part of a larger project on feminist models of writing, behavior, and knowledge to be found in Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du TempsPerdu. I am particularly interested in understanding how readers can acknowledge a literary model such as A La Recherche, recognizing its importance in their life and/or art, without necessarily embracing its esthetic, moral, or epistemological foundations (and even by openly rejecting them). Along with Sedgwick’s Works in Fiber, Paper and Proust (2005), I delved into Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000), Jacqueline Rose’s Albertine (2001) and Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout (2014). An important part of this research deals with questions raised by Sedgwick herself in her writings on Proust. In the final chapter of Epistemology of the Closet, she notably writes:
I was reading Proust for the first time during just the short stretch of years during which it occurred to me to have ambitions that were not exclusively under the aspect of eternity: to want to publish visibly, know people, make a go it, get a run for my money. Oddly, of course, it was reading Proust that made me want these adventures and think I could find them. The interminable meditation on the vanity of human wishes was a galvanizing failure for at least one reader: it was, if anything, the very sense of the transparency and predictability worldly ambitions that gave me the nerve and skill to have worldly ambitions of my own. Like, I believe, most young women, I never had a shred of identification with JuIien Sorel or the nineteenth-century French male plot of conquering the capital – until after the years of Proust-reading; then both the hero’s airy ambition and his concomitant uncritical adoption of a master text became intelligible and engaging traits (Sedgwick 1990, 241).
In preparing my visit to Duke, I had planned to explore this potential identification by dividing the materials I expected to consult into two categories: those related to Sedgwick’s academic work (syllabi from the seminars she held on Proust from around 1998 up to 2009, notes and drafts for Epistemology of the Closet and The Weather in Proust, scattered articles, and records of conferences) on the one hand, and those related to her artistic work (textile art, artists’ books, pieces from her 2005 exhibition, Works in Fiber, Paper and Proust) on the other. The days spent at Duke made me realize how much my plan was naive, even somewhat paradoxical, for these two practices are deeply intertwined and connected to each other in the same “fractal” way she suggests Proust’s novel should be read (Sedgwick 2011, 90-93).
Proust Box notebook with notes on paper dolls, hexaflexagons (first pages), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers, Box 40.
Proust Box notebook with notes on paper dolls, hexaflexagons (first pages), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers, Box 40.
I was most struck by two aspects of the materials I had the chance to consult in the archive. First, to see how Proust’s novel, in both its material dimension (the printed paper) and its virtual dimension (the hypertextual lattice we discover when not following a linear progression), becomes itself the object of a découture (witnessed by pages and pages of copied, printed and collaged quotations organized by Sedgwick under thematic headings such as Weather, Interior-outside, Albertine, Happiness, Anxiety, etc.), thus allowing the book’s complex architecture to emerge, while at the same time making it possible to detach from it, or even build it anew. Second, to observe how these shredded fragments feed into Sedgwick’s vast and increasingly central reflection on immanence (drawn on Proust as much as on Buddhism or the philosophy of Plotinus) to such an extent that the underlined pages of the many (including some multilingual) versions of A la recherche she uses over the years bear testimony to this gradual convergence, revealing how transformative reading the novel could have been for her.
My time at Rubenstein library has certainly given me the opportunity to enrich my project, helping me to better understand how Sedgwick reads, writes and seals in Proust – and not on, as she meant by the title of her exhibition at Harvard in 2005, “Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust.” But it has also, and most importantly, touched me on a personal level, made my Proustian reader self fully and enthusiastically agree with her when she notices that:
It is harder to say in what this truth-effect of Proust consists. AII the paradoxes of a more traditionally conceived vraisemblance are especially active here: molecularly, there are relatively few individual propositions in or arising from the book that it would make sense to consider true; and even at the molar level, propositions or “values” or “attitudes” (erotic or political pessimism, for instance) that could be extracted from Proust do not necessarily seem true to me, to whom, nonetheless, “Proust” seems so “true”. Plainly, classically, it can be said that the coherence and credibility of the work, its vraisemblance in the usual senses, depend on an internal structuration of materials and codes that can only as relation, as structure, be interdigitated with or tested against the relational structures of a “reality” that surrounds and interleaves and thus mutually constitutes it. The truth-effect I am describing goes beyond questions of the work’s coherence and credibility, however. It has to do with the use of the literary work, its (to sound censorious) expropriability by its readers, its (to sound, in a different vocabulary, celebratory) potential for empowering them. For, unmistakably, the autobiographical parable I have just encapsulated as “the years of Proust-reading” represents both a prolonged instance of textual abuse and a story of empowerment. (Sedgwick 1990, 241).
The Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024-2025 travel grants. Our research centers annually award travel grants to students, scholars, and independent researchers through a competitive application process. We extend a warm congratulations to this year’s awardees. We look forward to meeting and working with you!
Archive of Documentary Arts
Elizabeth Barahona, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University, “Black and Latino Coalition Building in Durham, North Carolina 1980-2010.” (Joint award with the Human Rights Archive)
Diana Ruiz, Faculty, University of Washington, Seattle, “Apprehension through Representation: Image Capture of the US-Mexico Border.” (Joint award with the Human Rights Archive)
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture
Mary Lily Research Travel Grants
Taylor Doherty, Ph.D. candidate, University of Arizona, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, “Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Anti-Imperialist Lesbian Feminist ‘Longed-for but Unrealized World.’”
Thalia Ertman, Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Los Angeles Department of History, “U.S. Feminist Anti-Nuclear Activism and Women’s Bodies, 1970s-1990s.”
Samuel Huber, Faculty, Yale University, Department of English. “A World We Can Bear: Kate Millett’s Life in Feminism.”
Alan Mitchell, Ph.D. candidate, Cambridge University, Faculty of Art History and Architecture, “Redefining Phoebe Anna Traquair through the lenses of historicism and intersectionality.”
Emily Nelms Chastain, Ph.D. candidate, Boston University, School of Theology, “The Clergywoman Question: The International Association of Women Preachers and Ecclesial Suffrage in American Methodism.”
Ana Parejo Vadillo, Faculty, School of Creative Arts, Cultures and Communications, Birkbeck, University of London, “Bound: The Queer Poetry of Michael Field.”
Carol Quirke, Faculty, American Studies, SUNY Old Westbury, “Feminism’s ‘Official Photographer:’ Bettye Lane, News Photography and Contemporary Feminism, 1969-2000.”
Paula Ramos, Independent Researcher, “Spatiality and gender: spatial circumstances of the creative process of feminist artists in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Dartricia Rollins, Graduate Student, University of Alabama, School of Library and Information Studies, “‘You Had to Be There:’ Charis’ 50-Year History as the South’s Oldest Independent Feminist Bookstore.”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grants
Ipek Sahinler, Ph.D. candidate, University of Texas Austin, “A Portrait of Young Women as Proto-Queer Thinkers: Eve Sedgwick vis-à-vis Gloria Anzaldúa.”
David Seitz, Faculty, Harvey Mudd College, “‘No Less Realistic’ but with ‘Different Ambitions’: Reparative Reading, Human Geography, and a Return to Sedgwick.
Doris Duke Foundation Travel Grants
Olivia Armandroff, Ph.D. candidate, University of Southern California, “Volcanic Matter: Land Formation and Artistic Creation.”
Cameron Bushnell, Faculty, Clemson University, Department of English. “‘The Invisible Orient’ in Orientalism Otherwise: Women Write the Orient.”
John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American History and Culture
Thomas Blakeslee, Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University, History Department, “Domestic Disturbances: The Resistant Masculinity of Black Fatherhood from Anti-Slavery to Civil Rights.”
Mara Curechian , Ph.D. candidate, School of English, University of St Andrews, “Acting Like Family: Performing Kinship in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
Michelle Decker, Faculty, Scripps College, English Department, George Washington Williams’s and Amanda B. Smith’s Appalachian Origins and African Explorations.”
Timothy Kumfer, Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgetown University, 2023-2024 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Counter-Capital: Grassroots Black Power and Urban Struggles in Washington, D.C.”
Hunter Moskowitz, Ph.D. candidate, Northeastern University, “Race and Labor in the Global Textile Industry: Lowell, Concord, and Monterrey in the Early 19th Century.”
Summer Sloane-Britt, Ph.D. candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, “Visions of Liberation: Gender and Photography in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960-1970.”
Mila Turner, Faculty, Clark Atlanta University, “Bridging Histories: Connecting the Atlanta Student Movement with College Student Activism throughout the Southeast”
Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grants for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History
Kadin Henningsen, Ph.D. candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Walt’s Companions.”
Julie Kliegman, Author, book-length exploration of transgender pioneers.
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
John Furr Fellowship
Hannah Pivo, Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology, “Charting the Future: Graphic Methods and Planning in the United States, c. 1910-60.”
Lewis Smith, Faculty, Brunel University London, Brunel Business School, Division of Marketing, “Marketing the State”: J. Walter Thompson Company and the Marketing of the Public Sector in Britain.”
Alvin Achenbaum Travel Grants
Warren Dennis, Ph.D. candidate, Boston University, “Hard Power Paths: Gender and American Energy Policy, 1960-2000.” (Joint award with History of Medicine with support from the Louis H. Roddis Endowment)
Dan Du, Faculty, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Department of History, “U.S. Tea Trade and Consumption after the American Revolution.”
Will Mari, Faculty, Louisiana State University, Manship School of Mass Communication, “Selling the computer to women media workers: gendered ads during the Cold War.”
Janine Rogers, Ph.D. candidate, University of California Los Angeles, Theater Department, “Performance, Militarization, and Materialisms: Canned Goods in Asian America”.
Foare
Jonathan MacDonald, Ph.D. candidate, Brown University, Department of American Studies, “Psychology Hits the Road: Driving Simulators, Billboards, and Hypnosis on the Highway.”
History of Medicine Collections
Warren Dennis, Ph.D. candidate, Boston University, “Hard Power Paths: Gender and American Energy Policy, 1960-2000.” (With support from the Louis H. Roddis Endowment; Joint award with the Hartman Center)
Ava Purkiss, Faculty, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, “After Anarcha: Black Women and Gynecological Medicine in the Twentieth Century.”
Baylee Staufenbiel, Ph.D. candidate, Florida State University, Department of History, “The Seven-Cell Uterus: De Spermate and the Anatomization of Cosmology.”
Brian Martin, Ph.D. candidate, University of Alabama, History Department, “Racial Theory and African American Medical Care in the U.S. Civil War.”
Human Rights Archive
“Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride” flyer, September 30, 2003, illustrates one area of coalition building in Durham, NC, as described in Elizabeth Barahona’s dissertation research proposal. From the Joan Preiss Papers, Box 27.
Elizabeth Barahona, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University, “Black and Latino Coalition Building in Durham, North Carolina 1980-2010.” (Joint award with the Archive of Documentary Arts)
Diana Ruiz, Faculty, University of Washington, Seattle, “Apprehension through Representation: Image Capture of the US-Mexico Border.” (Joint award with the Archive of Documentary Arts)
Kylie Smith, Faculty, Emory University. School of Nursing, Department of History, “No Place for Children: Disability, Civil Rights, and Juvenile Detention in North Carolina.”
Harrison Wick, Faculty, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) Special Collections and University Archives, “Examination of Primary Sources related to Social Justice and Latin American Immigration in the Human Rights Archive.”
Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grants for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History
History of Medicine Collections
Human Rights Archive
John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Mary Lily Research Grants)
Anyone whose research would be supported by sources from the Rubenstein Library’s research centers is eligible to apply. We encourage applications from students at any level of education; faculty and teachers; visual and performing artists; writers; filmmakers; public historians; and independent researchers. For assistance determining the eligibility of your project, please contact AskRL@duke.edu with the subject line “Travel Grants.”
Eligibility
Applicants must reside beyond a 100-mile radius of Durham, N.C., and may not be current Duke students or employees.
Information Session
An online information session will be held Thursday, January 11, 2024, 2-3 pm EST. This program will review application requirements, offer tips for creating a successful application, and include an opportunity for attendees to ask questions. This program will be recorded and posted online afterwards. Register for the session here.
Timeline
The deadline for applications will be Thursday, February 29, 2024, at 6:00 pm EST.
Decisions will be announced by the end of April 2024 for travel during May 2024-June 2025. Awards are paid as reimbursement after completion of the research visit(s).
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
