Awarded Fellowships

Mimi Cheng
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Art History
China on the Horizon: Art, Science, and Cartographies of Empire

Mimi Cheng is a cultural historian of the global nineteenth century with research interests in three overlapping areas: transnational visual culture between Europe and East Asia, comparative histories of cartography and the built environment, and the relationship between knowledge and imperialism. Her research has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, German Historical Institute Washington, and the Forschungzentrum Gotha at the Universität Erfurt, among others. She received her PhD from the University of Rochester in 2022.

At the Newberry, she will be working on her first book, which examines the connections between imperialism, visuality, and technical knowledge in 19th-century Sino-western relations. It centers the creation, transmission, and reception of spatial images—territorial surveys, topographical maps, atlases, nautical charts, and landscape photography—in the Qing, German, and British empires. She will continue this project with the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects,” led by Anna-Maria Meister at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut, in March 2025.

Hayley Cotter
The Monticello College Foundation Fellowship for Women and the Mellon Foundation Fellow
Lecturer in Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The Laws and Customs of the Early Modern Sea, 1483-1681

Hayley Cotter is a scholar of early modern literature and culture. Specifically, her work investigates the legal, literary, material, and cultural manifestations of maritime law in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Spenser Studies, and the Journal of Early Modern Studies. Hayley was the 2023-2024 Kemble Fellow in Maritime History at the Huntington Library and has also received fellowships from the Herzog August Bibliothek and the Renaissance Society of America. Her first book explores how the law of the sea manifested itself in English Renaissance poetry and drama. At the Newberry, she will conduct research for her second book, The Laws and Customs of the Early Modern Sea, 1483-1681. This project looks at early modern maritime law in a pan-European context and considers the materiality of printed texts as a central means of understanding the legal and cultural history of the sea.

Iyaxel Cojti Ren
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin
The Dawn of the K’iche’: Unveiling the Late Postclassic K’iche’ Communal Government and its Political Regime in the Maya Highlands

Iyaxel Cojti Ren is a K'iche' archaeologist from Chichicastenango, Guatemala. Currently, Iyaxel works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the director of the Baja Verapaz Archaeological Project in Guatemala and a co-investigator in the Mayalex project aiming to create online etymological dictionaries in various Mayan languages. As a fellow at the Newberry Library, Iyaxel will complete her new book about reconstructing the ancient K’iche’ communal government and its political regime at a regional level in the Maya Highlands. She proposes that vassals and allies played central roles in the expansion of the K’iche’ polity and that the K’iche’ rulers were willing to bargain some rights and obligations of their people. Parallel to this topic, Iyaxel will discuss the link between warfare, expansionism, and the emergence of relations of asymmetrical dependencies between the K’iche’ and other highland groups during the Late Postclassic Period (1250-1524 CE).

Wietse de Boer
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History at Miami University
The Windows of the Soul: Sensory Culture and Religious Conflict in Early Modern Italy

Wietse de Boer teaches medieval and early-modern European history at Miami University. His research focuses on the connections among religion, politics, and culture in early modern Italy. Past publications have examined confession and meditation, church discipline and inquisition, court culture, sense perception, theories of religious art, and the historiographies of Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. De Boer's books include The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Europe (2001) and Art in Dispute: Catholic Debates at the Time of Trent (2021), along with seven (co-)edited volumes. At the Newberry Library, he will be completing a monograph entitled The Windows of the Soul: Sensory Culture and Religious Conflict in Early Modern Italy. The book argues that basic assumptions about human sensation – the interface between the self and the world – underpinned Italy’s social order and religious practices. They were deeply implicated in the reforms and cultural conflicts that transformed the heartland of the Renaissance between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Enrique García Santo-Tomás
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and Audrey Lumsden Kouvel Fellow
Frank P. Casa Collegiate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan
Sparks of Recreation: Playing with Fire in Spain, 1560-1760

Enrique García Santo-Tomás is the Frank P. Casa Collegiate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, where he has been Senior Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program. His research has been supported by the Fundación Juan March, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities. He is the recipient of the ‘Premio Moratín de Ensayo a la Investigación Teatral’ (2001), the ‘Premio Villa de Madrid / Premio de Investigación Municipal Antonio Maura’ (2005), and the ‘William Riley Parker Prize for an Outstanding Article in PMLA’ (2009). He currently serves as Editor of the journal Comedia Performance. At the Newberry, he will be writing a book titled Sparks of Recreation: Playing with Fire in Spain, 1560-1760, which is expected to complete a trilogy of studies on the dialogue between fictional forms and the history of science and medicine in the Iberian Peninsula.

Anastazja Grudnicka
Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee Fellow
Postdoctoral Scholar of History at European University Institute
Feeling Peace in Reformation Europe

Anastazja Grudnicka is a historian of early modern Europe. Her research concerns religion, sociability, and materiality with a particular emphasis on identity, peacemaking, and environment. Anastazja received her doctorate from University College London, where she was a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar in the Humanities. She is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, where she has been working on her first monograph, provisionally entitled Ways of Believing: Holy Roman Emperor Matthias I (1557-1619) and the Making of Habsburg Catholicism. At Newberry, Anastazja will begin research on her second project which examines how peace was experienced and understood by early modern Europeans. According to the dominant narratives, religious reformations led to secularisation of the concept of peace. This project sets out to challenge these narratives by demonstrating how peace and piety remained intimately intertwined in the lives of early modern Christians.

Ryan Hall
Lloyd Lewis Fellow in American History
Associate Professor of History at Colgate University
Empire of Graft: The Reservation System and the Plundering of Native America

Ryan Hall is Associate Professor of History and Native American Studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. His first book, Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020, and more recently his work has appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era and the Western Historical Quarterly. At the Newberry, he will be working on a new book project entitled Empire of Graft: The Reservation System and the Plundering of Native America, which examines the history of fraud in America’s “Indian Affairs” administration and asks how the systemic plunder of reservations shaped both Indigenous and colonizer societies in the nineteenth century. Dr. Hall received his Ph.D. from Yale University, and his research has previously been supported by the Fulbright Canada Foundation, the University of Toronto’s University College, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Gregory Hitch
The Richard H. Brown/William Lloyd Barber Fellow
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Lawrence University, Wisconsin
The Forest Keepers: An Environmental History of the Menominee Nation from Colonization to Climate Change

Gregory Hitch is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Lawrence University. As a community-engaged interdisciplinary scholar, Hitch works with Indigenous communities fighting for environmental justice and sovereignty, in addition to researching the environmental history of settler colonialism in the United States.

While at the Newberry, Hitch will continue writing his first book, The Forest Keepers, which tells the story of how the Menominee preserved the last old-growth forest in what is currently Wisconsin. He argues that the Menominee were able to do this by consistently adapting to and resisting colonization by holding on to their ancestral knowledges, lifeways, and inter-species ethical frameworks while also appropriating dominant science and technologies to further their goals. Hitch demonstrates how to ethically do research with Indigenous communities and reveals a complex and adaptive Menominee knowledgeway based in energy flows as social relations, which in turn gave rise to a world-renowned method of regenerative forestry.

Matthew Kilbane
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame
The Ends of Poetry: Community Writing and the Unreadable Archive

Matthew Kilbane is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches and writes about modern and contemporary poetry in the U.S., literature and music, the history of sound technologies, and digital literary cultures. He is the author of The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), which received the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award, and the editor of the forthcoming volume Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures (Amherst College Press, 2025). Before arriving at Notre Dame, Kilbane served as the Joseph F. Martino Lecturer at Cornell University, where he also taught with the Cornell Prison Education Program.

At the Newberry, Kilbane will work on his second book project, The Ends of Poetry: Community Writing and the Unreadable Archive. The Ends of Poetry unfolds a new history of modern poetry from the perspective of the community-based writing workshop, a marginalized literary institution with the potential to renew our sense of poetry’s social life across the twentieth century.

Gloria Moorman
Mellon Foundation Fellow
AHRC Research Associate, Universities of Oxford and Manchester
Fellow, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick
Catacombs, Sacred Archaeology and the Early Printed Book: The Global Ownership of Discovery (c. 1578-1700)

Gloria Moorman received her PhD from the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, and currently works at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. She investigates the visual representation of power across early modern Italy, with a special emphasis on Rome.

At the Newberry, she will start researching the historical appropriation of the Jewish, Christian, and pagan catacombs (subterranean cemeteries) of the former Roman Empire. By studying their representation over time, her second book project aims to further our understanding of the global reception of cultural interconnectivity in the Mediterranean, newly revealed through the lens of book ownership. The project builds on Gloria’s article ‘Atlases Fit for a Future King’ (La Bibliofilia essay prize in memory of Dennis E. Rhodes).

Blaire Morseau
Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies and Mellon Foundation Fellow
Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Michigan State University
Beyond the Spectacle: Tracing the Roots of Indigenous Science Fiction and Futurism in America from the Archives to Contemporary Visions

Blaire Morseau is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Michigan State University. She recently released an edited volume featuring the collection of antique birch bark books written by 19th century Potawatomi author Simon Pokagon, titled, As Sacred to Us. Her research interests are in Indigenous science fiction, futurisms, traditional knowledge, and Native counter-mapping. Her most recent book project with the University of Arizona Press, tentatively titled Mapping Neshnabé Futurity (forthcoming 2025), investigates Indigenous environmental activism through the lens of Indigenous speculative fictions to reclaim space in the Great Lakes region. During the Newberry fellowship, Blaire will embark on a new research project that situates the current proliferation of contemporary Indigenous science fiction in historical context by tracing the ways early creative work and activism by Native peoples resisted settler colonial projects of futurity.

Barbara Mundy
The David L. Wagner Distinguished Fellow
Professor of Art History and Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art at Tulane University
The Embodiment of the Word: Bookmaking and Worldmaking in New Spain

While at the Newberry, Mundy will complete a book manuscript, The Embodiment of the Word: Bookmaking and Worldmaking in New Spain. It explores how sixteenth century artists and writers working in multi-ethnic New Spain made sense of the changing world around them through the books that they made. To do so, they drew on a deep manuscript and book tradition, rooted in Indigenous practice, and experimented with different kinds of writing. But artists and writers were not the only creative agents, and this work considers the qualities and affordances of the surrounding environment, in particular, pigments and paper, in the work of worldmaking. The extraordinary collections of the Newberry Library figure prominently in this story. Mundy is currently the Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History at Tulane University. Her previous books include The Mapping of New Spain (Chicago, 1996) and The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Texas, 2015). Long engaged with digital scholarship, she and Dana Leibsohn developed a pioneering website on colonial Latin American art, titled Vistas. Mundy has served on the editorial boards of the Estudios de cultura náhuatl and The Americas, and her scholarship has been supported by the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the John Carter Brown Library, and the Library of Congress.

Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Loyola University Chicago
Give Drink to the Sun: Life as a Nahua Ritual Specialist

Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry is an historian of religion and ritual, with a focus on Indigenous traditions of Mesoamerica, the early modern period, and trans-Atlantic colonialism. He has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (University of Texas at Austin, 2021) and is Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago. His project, Give Drink to the Sun, questions the limits of applying Eurocentric theories of religion on Indigenous ceremonies. It demonstrates that household ritual specialists were official participants in the life cycles of the city-states, before and after European occupation. The book embraces multidisciplinary approaches, from archeology to ethnohistory and pictorial documentation, and the history of science from the medieval and early modern periods.

Jazma Sutton
The Lloyd Lewis Fellow in American History
Assistant Professor of History at Miami University
Moving toward Freedom: Black Women, Freedom, and Early Migration in Antebellum Indiana.

Jazma Sutton is Assistant Professor of History at Miami University. Her research focuses on the histories of slavery and freedom in the U.S. with a particular interest in African American women’s history and the Midwest. Her research interests also include descendant communities, Black digital humanities, and critical archival studies.

During her residency at the Newberry Library, she will work to complete a book project titled, Moving toward Freedom: Black Women, Freedom, and Early Migration in Antebellum Indiana. As the first historical survey of Black women in the antebellum Midwest, the book chronicles the lives of Black women—free, enslaved, and self-liberated—who chose (or were forced) to leave the South and settle in Indiana, between 1787 and 1865. Consulting descendant archives, oral histories, and more conventional historical sources such as Supreme Court cases, newspapers, letters, and manumission records, it explores Black women’s motivations for migrating to the Midwest, the means by which they ventured there, and the ways in which they assigned meaning to where they lived once they arrived.