Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowships
The 2012-2013 Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowships application process is closed
The Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowships, established by bequest of George W. Platzman (1920-2008), Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences at the University, are named in memory of George’s brother Robert Platzman (1918-1973), who was Professor of Chemistry and Physics and worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in the 1940s.
The program provides up to $3,000 for visiting researchers working on projects that require on-site consultation of University of Chicago Library collections, primarily archives, manuscripts or printed materials in the Special Collections Research Center. The funds can be used for travel, living and research expenses. Support for beginning scholars is a priority of the program, as are projects that cannot be conducted without onsite access to the original materials and where University of Chicago collections are central to the research. Special consideration will be given to applications in the fields of late 19th or early 20th-century physics or physical chemistry, or 19th-century classical opera.
Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship Recipients
2012
Wendell Vernon Eckford, Ralph Bunche Associate Professor of History, Affiliate Faculty, African American Studies, The Los Angeles City College, to use the Allison Davis Papers for a work on a biography of Allison Davis.
Daniel Ellis, Assistant Professor, Department of English, St. Bonaventure University, to consult the Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection of Court and Manorial Documents for a study of “The Tudor Statesman at Home: Political Orators and the Rhetoric of Domesticity.” Daniel Ellis has been named the Hans Lenneberg Fellow.
Catherine Keyser, Assistant Professor, English Department, University of South Carolina, to consult the Benjamin Heller & Company Collection as part of an investigation of literary representations of food science and the role of artificial flavor as a literary emblem.
Andrew Meade McGee, Ph.D. candidate, Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, to study the history of mainframe computing at the University of Chicago and the role of computer-assisted, systematized urban redevelopment planning in the Chicago area during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
Dawn Odell, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Lewis and Clark College, to examine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century printed descriptions of the Dutch colony of Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia) for a study of relationships among the culturally diverse population of the city.
Michelle Orihel, Visiting Assistant Professor, Southern Utah University, for research on late eighteenth-century Kentucky politics and the democratic clubs that formed in Kentucky.
Laura D. Phillips, Ph.D. candidate, Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, to study the Chicago-based American Fair Trade League for a dissertation on “The American Fair Trade Controversy: Law and Economics in Transition, 1890-1940.”
Edmund Ramsden, Research Fellow, Centre for medical History, University of Exeter, for a project on “the Problem of the Crowd in Nature and the City: Animal and Human Ecology in Twentieth Century Chicago.”
Evan Roberts, Assistant Professor, History, University of Minnesota, for a study of changing attitudes to married women’s work.
Ibram Rogers, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University, for a project on the black campus movement, 1965-1972.
Adam Shapiro, NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Medical History and Bioethics, University Wisconsin-Madison, for a study of William Paley’s thought and writings from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Adam Shapiro has been named the Robert Rosenthal Fellow.
Joshua Smith, Ph.D. Candidate, Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Western Ontario, to consult the papers of Sol Tax and related collections for a dissertation on Action Anthropology: An Ethnography of Anthropological Methods.”
Alex J. Taylor, Ph.D. candidate, Doctor of Philosophy (History of Art), University of Oxford, for a study of how contemporary art was absorbed into the marketing and public relations activities of many major American corporations in the 1950s and 1960s.
Michael E. Woods, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, University of South Carolina, for a dissertation on Civil War causation from the perspective of emotions history.
Special Collections Research Fellowship Recipients
2009-2010
Lorenzo DiTommaso, Department of Theology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada, to study five medieval manuscripts in the University of Chicago’s collection as part of a project to assess the textual and literary importance of manuscript copies of "Old Testament Pseudepigrapha," ancient and medieval writings which are attributed to or associated with biblical persons, events, or settings, but not part of the Old Testament.
Seth Feman, Ph.D. candidate in American Studies, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, for research on his dissertation, "Immaterial Modern: Subjectivity in Art and Its Institutions, 1939-1964." Feman will study the relationship between Container Corporation of America’s famous ad campaigns featuring modern art and its efforts to increase production, drawing on the papers of Walter Paepcke and Elizabeth Paepcke and the RR Donnelley corporate archive.
Richard O’Brien, Ph.D. candidate at Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom, to use the Saul Bellow Papers for research on his dissertation topic, "The Politics of Fiction: Saul Bellow and Partisan Review, 1941-1962." Mr. O’Brien will examine Bellow’s correspondence with his peers at the Partisan Review, the magazine in which his first pieces of fiction were published.
Alexandra Puerto, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Occidental College, Los Angeles, California, will work on revising her dissertation into a manuscript tentatively entitled "Measuring the Maya: Race, Science and the Idea of the Indian in Mexico-U.S. Relations, 1920s-1940s," drawing on the papers of Chicago social anthropologists to study their influence on Maya research, ethnology and representation.
Rachel A. Shapiro, Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, for research on her dissertation on the influence of community life in Washington, D.C., on American political events leading up to the Civil War. Shapiro will consult the papers of Stephen A. Douglas, the William E. Barton Collection of Lincolniana, and related materials.
Patrick Slaney, Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, for research on his dissertation, "Science and Freedom: The Republic of Science and the Ideal of Scientific Community in an Anti-Communist Age." Slaney will consult the papers of individual scientists and the records of atomic scientists groups and organizations formed to promote world government to understand the origins of the idea of the scientific community.
D. Clinton Williams, Ph.D. candidate in History of American Civilization, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for research on his dissertation, "Righteous Politics in the Black Metropolis: Race, Religion, and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar Chicago." Williams will focus on archival collections relating to Hyde Park urban redevelopment to explore the role of religious institutions, leaders, and parishioners in resisting urban redevelopment policies, advocating for integration, and revitalizing the community.
2008-2009
Matthias A. Deuschle, Theologische Fakultät Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, for "Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg and the Religious Conservatism in Nineteenth-Century Prussia." The personal library of Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802-1869) was purchased by the old University of Chicago in 1869. Dr. Deuschle will do a critical assessment of the collection and examine individual books for annotations and marginalia that provide insights into Hengstenberg's thought.
Meredith T. McMunn, Professor of English and Medieval Studies, Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island, for "Reconstructing a Rose: The Codicology and Early Ownership History of University of Chicago Library MSS 1380 and 393." Professor McMunn will examine the recently-acquired 14th-century manuscript of Le Roman de la Rose and Le Jeu des échecs moralisé, another 14th-century manuscript in the Library's collection, with which it was previously bound. The complete descriptions will form part of Professor McMunn's study of all the extant illustrated manuscripts of Le Roman de la Rose, which she is preparing for publication.
Nicole Nesberg, University of Florida, for "Gender and American Indian Urbanization in Chicago and Cleveland, 1946-1970." Ms. Nesberg's dissertation examines how American Indian families, communities, and identities were created during the post-World War II shift from rural to urban areas, using the lens of gender and focusing on two major Midwestern cities, Chicago and Cleveland. She will consult the papers of University of Chicagoanthropologists Sol Tax and Fred Eggan and other related collections for her project.
Nadine Rinck, Johann Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, for "Max Rheinstein: His Life and Work." Ms. Rinck is a law student writing a doctoral thesis on Rheinstein (1899-1977), who came to the United States in 1933 and was a professor of law at the University of Chicago, 1935-1968. His generation of legal scholars was unique in achieving expertise in both the Continental-European legal system and the Anglo-American Common Law system. Ms. Rinck's project draws on the Rheinstein papers for documentation of his biography and his influence in the fields of comparative law, especially the conflict of laws; the sociology of law, and family law.
2007-2008
David C. Brighouse, Ph.D. candidate in African-American Studies and History at Harvard University, for "Investigating the Color Line: The Social Science Community and Talented Tenth Scholars in Chicago (ca. 1930s-1950s)." This social and intellectual history of the relationship between social science, African-American scholars, and civil rights in Chicago in this period draws on the papers of Ernest Burgess, W. Allison Davis, Louis Wirth, Robert Park, and others.
Edward J.K. Gitre, Ph.D. candidate, Rutgers University, for "America Adjusted: A cultural History of Boredom, ca. 1930-1980." Investigating the University of Chicago's highly influential role in the development of social psychology, this project examines the papers of Ernest Burgess, Everett Hughes, Edward Levi and others; and the Department of Sociology records.
Philip Slavin, Ph.D. candidate, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, for studies related to his dissertation on food provisioning of Norwich Cathedral Priory. For research on the agrarian history of East Anglia in the late middle ages, this project includes consulting and tabulating 150 rolls from the Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection of English Court and Manorial Documents.
2006-2007
Katja Naumann, University of Leipzig, for "The Expansion of Historical Space: The Study of Civilizations in U. S. American Academia," a comparative study of academic programs at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Columbia University from 1917 to 1968.
Jonathan Sachs, Ph.D. in English, University of Chicago, for "Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the Romantic Imagination, 1789-1832," a book project drawing on 18th-century rare books and popular Roman histories published in the period.
Tasha Vorderstrasse, Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Chicago, for a study of the interaction between archaeology, art history, and texts; utilizing early manuscripts in Special Collections, this project extends previous work on the pottery and material culture of northwestern Iran, Georgia, and Armenia.
