2007

Crawford Alexander Mann III

When in Rome: Italian Travel and the Pursuit of the Ideal Male Body in Antibellum American Art

Mr. Mann is a Ph.D. candidate in Yale's History of Art department. He studied in Heidelberg, 2000-2001, and in Rome, Italy, 2006-2007 on a Theodore Rousseau Fellowship awarded by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His dissertation will analyze the "production and consumption of the work of the painters Washington Allston and Thomas Cole and the sculptors Horatio Greenough and Thomas Crawford". Allston's papers in the Longfellow House archives are vital to his project as well as the remnants of Allston's personal library.

Bryan C. Sinche

Sailors, Slaves, and Savages: The Contest for Citizenship in Antebellum Sea Narratives

Sinche is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hartford. He received his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of North Carolina. During his graduate work he won several research and teaching awards at UNC.

Sinche's book project, investigates the nature of citizenship in the antebellum maritime world. He will use the R. H. Dana, Jr. papers and those of other Dana family members who edited later editions of Two Years Before the Mast to augment material he previously gathered on Dana for his dissertation.

2006

Virginia Jackson, Tufts University Paterson Fellow

Longfellow and the Institution of Poetry

Virginia Jackson, Associate Professor of English at Tufts received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton. Her book, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) has won several important awards. Her current book-in-progress is National Meter: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry in Public.

In National Meter (in progress), Jackson aims to reconstruct nineteenth-century poetic culture as it was organized by and around the work of eight very different poets. She seems Longfellow as "the most important of these case studies" for a number of reasons including his emphasis on comparative literature. She will utilize various aspects of the Longfellow House collections to supplement her work on the Longfellow papers in Harvard's Houghton Library.

Charles C. Calhoun, Independent Scholar Korzenik Fellow

Thomas Gold Appleton

Charles Calhoun was educated at the University of Virginia and Oxford which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. His Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life appeared in 2004. He is currently working on a book "re-examining the cultural and social life of Boston in the post-Civil War decades".

The story of Appleton, Fanny Longfellow's brother who was an important figure in the Longfellows' lives, will appear in Calhoun's book-in-progress. Calhoun plans to "trace Tom Appleton's path through the correspondence, travel diaries, photographic collections legal documents, and memorabilia of the extended Longfellow family..." He will also study the art objects in the House which Appleton gave to the Longfellows.

2005

Christopher N. Phillips, Stanford University (graduate student) Korzenik Fellow

Longfellow's Epic Literature: Rereading Heroic Form in Longfellow's Career

Mr. Phillips is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English. He has won several awards, including a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, in addition to publishing on Melville and Sophia Hawthorne. His dissertation-in-progress titled Inventing Heroes in the Republic: Cultural Uses of Epic in the United States, 1785-1876.

Drawing on innovations from British and German Romantic writers, Longfellow created an American poetics through his epic work that spoke to both American and international readers. Phillips will study Longfellow's library to determine which epics from other literatures he might have read and annotated and will examine other parts of the collections that may offer insights on his topic.

2004

Ivan Jaksic

The Spanish Student: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Jaksic, a well published historian of the Hispanic world, is Professor of History at Notre Dame University

As part of a book project about American intellectuals and the Hispanic world, 1820-1880, Professor Jaksic will use the Longfellow papers in Houghton Library and the Spanish books in the Longfellow House collections (many of which are presentation copies).

L. Jill Lamberton

Claiming an Education: Alice Mary Longfellow and the Legacy of Transatlantic Collaboration in Nineteenth-century Women's Higher Education

Ms. Lamberton is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education and the Women's Studies Certification Program at the University of Michigan.

Alice Longfellow was an activist for women's higher education. Ms. Lamberton will use her archives in the Longfellow House collections which include journals, course notebooks, drafts of speeches, papers and exams and relevant letters.

2003

Alan W. Wald, University of Michigan

The Life and Work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, 1881-1950

Alan M. Wald is Professor of English Literature and Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His scholarly focus has been on American radical politics and literature. His current study comes from his longstanding interest in the political commitments of diverse twentieth century literary intellectuals. One of his earlier books, The Revolutionary Imagination (1983), dealt with John Brooks Wheelwright, another Boston literary radical from an eminent family who was a contemporary of Dana.

Professor Wald is "especially interested in (Dana's) publications on Soviet theater in relationship to his political activities, views and commitments. But in order to gain a perspective, I intend to research his entire life" He will consult the 100 linear feet of Dana's person papers in our archives, and other relevant Boston archives such as the Russian Theater Collection at Harvard.

2002

Colleen G. Boggs, Dartmouth College

The American Translation: Romantic Language Theory, Intertextual Practices and the Transatlantic Nation, 1790-1890

Colleen Boggs is now Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth. She received her B.A. from Yale and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, earning a number of honors, including summa cum laude graduation and Phi Beta Kappa at Yale. Chapters on Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman from her book-in-progress have been or will be published in journals. Among her presentations is a paper she gave to the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in 2000 on "Specimens of Translation: Whitman, Longfellow, and the Nature of American Poetry".

Professor Boggs's book-in-progress considers a number of American authors, including Wheatley, Emerson, Fuller, Whitman, and Stowe. Longfellow, who was both a widely-translated poet and a translator, is the key figure in her discussion of an approach to translation that is "uprooted yet nationalistic". Prof. Boggs intends to use the Longfellow House archives to gain a clearer understanding of the role that language acquisition and translation played in the Longfellow household. She also plans to look at Longfellow's library (on display in the house and available to scholars) and the archives' Dana and Waddy Longfellow collections for material relevant to language issues.

Patricia Roylance, Stanford University (graduate student)

Alternative Ancestries: Redefining Nationalism and the Usable Past in the Ante-bellum Historical Imagination

Ms. Roylance is a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford's English Department. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received a dissertation fellowship from the Stanford Humanities Center for 2002-2003.

Ms. Roylance's research seeks to explore how other countries' histories affected ante-bellum America's national identity. Longfellow is the subject of her dissertation's fifth chapter, tentatively titled "The International Nationalist"; it explores his approach to nationalism as embracing rather than rejecting the achievements of other national cultures. Ms. Roylance will examine Longfellow's library to assess the distribution of foreign and American publishers. Similarly, she will study the family's art collection (hung on the walls as it was during Longfellow's occupancy), Charlie Longfellow's papers, and other materials that might reveal the household's cosmopolitanism.

2001

James W. Trent, Southern Illinois University

The Longfellows and the Howes: A Study of Friendships and Social Change

Professor Trent first became interested in the Howes while doing research on his book, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (University of California Press, 1994). He has written a number of articles and another book (with Steven Noll), Perpetual Children: Retardation in American History, will be published shortly by New York University Press.

A historian of the social services in America, he is a professor in the Department of Social Work at Southern Illinois University.

Professor Trent is writing a book on the philanthropic activities of Samuel Gridley and Julia Ward Howe. Howe was a member of the "Five of Clubs," the weekly dinner-group made up of Charles Sumner, Cornelius Felton and George Hillard, Longfellow and Howe. Through Charles Sumner, Julia Ward Howe and Frances Appleton Longfellow met and remained friends. In addition to collections available in Houghton Library and Schlesinger Library, he plans to use the Longfellow House archives to examine the correspondence, diaries, and papers that deal with these friendships.

Angela Sorby, Marquette University

Learning by Heart: Poetry, Pedagogy, and Daily Life in America, 1855-1915

Professor Sorby's current project first took shape as her dissertation.

She is a published poet who received the 1994 "Discovery/The Nation" prize in poetry from the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street "Y" in New York City. She has published several scholarly journal articles and her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry 1995, American Poetry: The Next Generation (2000), and in a volume of her poems: Distance Learning: Poems (New Issues Poetry Series /Western Michigan University Press, 1998). Sorby is an assistant professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

Professor Sorby's project addresses the role of popular poetry in American daily life during the latter half of the nineteenth century. She contends that the "cultural work" of Longfellow, Whittier, Riley and other popular poets was specifically pedagogical work.

Among other things she argues "that such poetry taught readers to perform -- and to internalize, or 'learn by heart' -- versions of middle-class subjectivity that were rooted in stabilizing (though sometimes also infantilizing) narratives of the nation and its traditions."

In her pursuit of Longfellow as the "schoolroom poet" she is particularly interested in examining the Alice Longfellow, House Trust, and Fanny Appleton Longfellow papers with a special focus on correspondence with children, Alice's benefactions, the educational role of the House, and the education of the Longfellow children.

2000

Melanie Hall, Boston University

Preservation and the "Home of the Poet": Shakespeare, Longfellow and Wordsworth

Professor Hall holds a position as associate professor in Boston University's Art History Department. She is also a well established consultant on historic sites and furnishings with a practice (and residences) in England and the United States and the author of several articles and monographs.

Professor Hall will compare the circumstances surrounding the preservation of the Longfellow House with the preservation of houses of nationally-recognized poets in England, notably Shakespeare and Wordsworth, as well as that of Goethe in Frankfurt.

She proposes to use a wide range of the Longfellow House archival holdings. Her earlier research for her present project was partly funded by a grant from the Heritage Studies (UK) and the Geography Research Center, at the Nottingham Trent University.

Amy Elizabeth Johnson, University of Delaware (graduate student)

'Building the Home Feeling:' Tenement House Reform in Boston, 1850-1920

Ms. Johnson will study the papers and other materials in Waddy Longfellow's as yet uncataloged files in our archives. Ms. Johnson is an advanced graduate student in the Department of American Art and Architecture, University of Delaware.

Johnson's dissertation project is a study of the Boston Cooperative, a group of prominent Bostonians which included Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr. The Cooperative was one of a number of private public spirited efforts in America to alleviate the effects of industrialization, urbanization and immigration on the living conditions in American cities.

Waddy Longfellow was both a member of the Cooperative and the architect for the company?s model tenement which was built in Boston's South End in the early 1890s. This structure was one of the first courtyard apartment houses built as part of the housing reform movement in this country.

1999

Gretchen Adams, University of New Hampshire (graduate student)

The Specter of Salem in American Culture

Ms. Adams is an advanced graduate student in American History at the University of New Hampshire.

Update Spring 2002: Gretchen Adams has accepted a position at Texas Tech University and her dissertation has been accepted for publication by the University of Chicago Press.

Gretchen Adams's dissertation project is a study of the changing nature of the meanings of the Salem witch trials in American culture over three centuries. Her focus is on the nexus of popular and scholarly narrative constructions of the Puritan past and its changing meaning. No one "demonstrates the synergy of these two strands of American intellectual development as clearly as does Henry Wadsworth Longfellow." She intends to use her Cambridge residency to study Longfellow and his circle and their opinions about Salem and the Puritan past.