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LEOPOLD FELLOWS—Call for Applications for 2015-2016
The Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies announces the 8th year of its undergraduateprogram honoring Professor Richard Leopold, a long-time member of the NU Department of History. The program provides a small group of able undergraduate students withan opportunity to engage in genuine historical research. LeopoldFellows will work on current faculty research projects, learning howto interpret archival and documentary materials. Successful candidates should demonstrate an interest in learning how to interpret complex primary data. Working under the guidance of amember of the Department of History, the Leopold Fellow will learn how scholars develop arguments out of diverse research materials.
Each Leopold Fellow receives financial support as a Research Assistant (at $10 per hour for a possible average of 8-10 hours a week). The program should not be confused with Work-Study. The program may also fund travel or other expenses incurred by the Leopold Fellows.
Students may apply to be Leopold Fellows for two or three quarters, which can include the summer.The Leopold Fellowsmeet formally as a group once or more a quarter to discuss their experiences. At the end of the fellowship term a completed survey form and a short report on the substance of the research are required.
Application process: Please look over our list of faculty projects below and if interested apply for a Fellowship. History faculty may nominate students to apply or interested students may apply in response to a specific faculty project. In either case, please provide the following information:
· one-page resume with name, year, and contact information
· list of history classes taken (with grades received)
· short statement about why you would like to pursue a Leopold Fellowship, indicating on which
ONE or TWO projects you would like to work and what quarters you are AVAILABLE.
Please send applications to Asst. Director Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch via e-mail at . The deadline for completed applications is Monday, MAY 4 by 4 p.m. Faculty may wish to interview you in the next few weeks. Announcement of successful candidates will occur in the fourth week of May.
Questions should be directed via e-mail to or phone (847-467-0885).The CCHS website is at www.historicalstudies.northwestern.edu and updated FACULTY RESEARCH PROJECT descriptions and details can be viewed online at http://www.historicalstudies.northwestern.edu/leopold.htm .
Please note: Leopold Fellows may be dropped from the program, if they fail to work closely with their mentor or cannot carry out the proposed research assignment in a timely and ethical fashion.
2015-2016 Faculty research projects
(more may be added in April)
Henry BINFORD
Small Business in Poor Urban Communities
The work to be done arises from my current research on nineteenth-century “slum” communities and bridges into work that I will undertake in the future. The student researcher will use statistical, library, and archival resources to study the lives of immigrant and African American small business persons in poor areas of Chicago and/or Cincinnati in the mid-nineteenth century. The student will begin by doing some basic reading about these communities, in both secondary works and in the manuscript I am writing. Then, using materials I have already gathered, together with information from the Northwestern and other area libraries, the student will undertake a study of one or perhaps two wards in the cities mentioned above. He or she will create collective biographical databases (prosopographies) containing basic census information from 1840 through 1860 about all of the immigrant and African American individuals who own real estate and are engaged in some form of low-level entrepreneurial work (storekeepers, saloonkeepers, coal dealers, boarding house keepers, laundry owners, etc.). The student will then look for these individuals in other kinds of records — tax lists, property deeds, directories, political and legal records -- expanding the collective biography to allow an examination of careers. The researcher may need to spend a few days in Cincinnati to access records only available at the Cincinnati Historical Society and the Hamilton County Courthouse. The overall goal will be to trace the lives of these individuals backward and forward in time, asking how they acquired property and how their situations changed, and comparing people of different backgrounds, men and women, residents of different places. I will help the student to use this information to address larger questions: What role did small stakeholders from minority backgrounds play in the larger political and social life of their cities? To what extent did property give them leverage, either formal or informal? How did they make use of the ward-based political systems then dominant in these cities? How did they engage with the powerful business and political leaders of the civic elites? To what extent did these obscure entrepreneurs shape the physical and social development of the city? The student will conclude the work by writing a report on his/her findings. I will work closely with the student at all stages of this process.
Fall, winter and spring quarters 2015-2016
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Deborah COHEN
Women with Money
What difference did a fortune make for women? My new book considers female wealth-holding -- heiresses, widows and businesswomen -- in Britain and the United States from the 1870s to the 1970s. Money might not buy happiness, but did it buy autonomy or love? What generalizations might be drawn from a disparate set of individual cases? TheLeopoldFellow will pursue these questions through research into printed primary sources, as well as archival holdings in Chicago.
Summer research will be conducted in Chicago (and possibly also Milwaukee and Madison) archives. This fellowship is for the summer, fall and spring.
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Benjamin FROMMER
The Ghetto without Walls: The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia
The Leopold Fellow will contribute to research for my current book project: The Ghetto without Walls: The Identification, Isolation and Deportation of Bohemian and Moravia Jewry, 1938-1945. Once completed, the book will present a comprehensive history of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia (today’s Czech Republic) from the onset of Nazi German occupation to postwar efforts to punish war criminals. From 1938 onwards the once integrated Jewish community found itself increasingly isolated by a series of repressive sanctions that deprived Jews of their civic rights, property, and freedoms of association, movement, and religion. Historians have described this process as the construction of a “ghetto without walls,” which segregated Jews from their Gentile neighbors and created the conditions for their ultimate deportation to ghettoes and killing centers. My project seeks to discover who initiated, developed, implemented these sanctions and to what extent (and with what effect) the measures were enforced. I also aim to recapture how the region’s Jews experienced the process of social isolation prior to their deportation.
The Leopold Fellow will conduct research on the oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Northwestern is one of the few access points to the USA Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (a.k.a. the Spielberg archive), a database of more than 51,000 interviews conducted with witnesses to the Holocaust. The Fellow will analyze testimony of survivors from Bohemia and Moravia and will seek to understand the nature of life under Nazi occupation. In particular, the fellow will reconstruct how Jews interacted with their Gentile neighbors and how they reacted to persecution (for example, how they educated their children after Jews had been expelled from the schools; how they procured food they weren’t allowed according to rationing; how they maintained religious life once synagogues were closed; etc.). The USC Shoah Archive interviews are in a number of languages. The Leopold Fellow can conduct the research in English and/or Hebrew.
Open 2-3 quarters in 2015-16. Languages: English and/or Hebrew.
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Joanna GRISINGER
New Voices in Closed Spaces:The Administrative State and the Right to Participate
What did the right to participate in agency action look like, in the years following the New Deal? And what did the expansion of this right in the 1960s and 1970s mean for agency autonomy? To answer this question, I am looking atthe evolution of participation at economic regulatory agencies, such as theCivil Aeronautics Board, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Interstate Commerce Commission, from their heyday in the1930s to the outburst of new pressures (from civil rights groups, women's groups, and environmental groups)in the 1960s and1970s. By design, regulated partiesplayed an active role in the administrative process at each agency, and eachdeveloped in tandem with the industry they regulated. Such relationshipsdefined administrators'conceptions of competition and the public interest, and theseclose relations between regulator and regulateddemonstrated the power of access (and gave rise to frequent charges of capture and clientalism). However, as public interest groupsbegan to recognize the importance of administrative authority,they challenged the commissions'traditional bureaucratic autonomy. I am interested in how these confrontations occurred, and how successful they were at bringingfresh voices into closed spaces.
Summer and Fall 2015. Some experience with legal materials preferred butnot required.
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Kate MASUR
Liberty, Policing, and the Rights of Free African Americans from the Colonial Period to the 14th Amendment
My book project explores evolving understandings of personal liberty in the United States from the 1790s through the 1860s by focusing on the rights of free African Americans. A Leopold Fellow would help me find and analyze sources by using (for example) digitized newspapers, microfilm, and manuscript collections. The fellow should be organized and meticulous and have significant interest in U.S. legal history and/or African American history. Quarters are flexible, but I'm interested in someone who could work over the summer (beginning second week of July) and for at least two quarters of the academic year.
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Kate MASUR
The United States during Reconstruction: A Public History Project
The Leopold Fellow will work closely with Prof. Masur and her collaborator on a project commissioned by the National Park Service. The fellow must be available in summer and fall quarters. The project involves locating, recording, and assessing historic sites related to the era of Reconstruction. The work will require communicating with public history professionals elsewhere (via email and perhaps phone), collating information that we receive, and analyzing the information to determine the strengths and weaknesses of historic sites. Strong administrative skills and professionalism are required, as is serious interest in nineteenth-century U.S. history.
Summer and Fall 2015
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Susan J. PEARSON
Registering Birth: Populations and Personhood in the United States of America
Do you know when you were born? Most of us do know exactly the date of our birth and we use our birth certificates to prove our age and national citizenship for access to all kinds of rights and privileges: to attend school, work, vote, hold political office, drive, marry, get a passport, and more. But this is a surprisingly recent state of affairs. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that babies born in the United States were reliably registered at birth. In this, the United States lagged far behind other industrialized, Western nations. My research project traces how and why birth registration and birth certificates became both universal and compulsory throughout the United States.
I would like to employ a Leopold Fellow for Fall 2015 & Winter 2016 (those these dates are flexible). A Fellow would help with two distinct research tasks. First, the Fellow would utilize archival collections at the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago History Museum. Second, the fellow would conduct magazine and newspaper research in Evanston to help identify significant events, legal reforms, and persons involved in the history of birth registration.
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Michael SHERRY
Go Directly to Jail: The Punitive Turn in American Life,
My project traces the connections and feedback loops between war-fighting and crime-fighting in the US since the 1960s. It attempts to explain why Americans became fond of speaking of a “war on crime,” how the militarization of policing came about, why mass incarceration arose, and why a punitive stance emerged in many other arenas (“zero tolerance” in schools, for example). It focuses especially on presidential and other political rhetoric about crime.
A Leopold Fellow would help retrieve and analyze public opinion data and political rhetoric, especially post-2000. Much of this book is now drafted, and a Fellow would also assist in refining draft chapters by plugging gaps in their evidence, updating and/or double-checking citations (especially to online sources), and assessing what makes sense to them in the drafts. No special skills are required, but industriousness and initiative in tracking things down and calling new sources to my attention are important. A basic knowledge of post-1960 US history is essential. The Fellow would work mostly in the fall and winter quarters. Fall 2015 and winter 2016.
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Scott SOWERBY
States of Exclusion: Britain, Ireland, and France, 1640–1720
The seventeenth century in England, Scotland, Ireland, and France saw an intensification of earlier trends toward the exclusion of disfavored religious groups. In France, Louis XIV’s Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685 outlawed the Protestant faith and reversed Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes. In England, Catholics were barred from serving in public office in 1673, banned from sitting in parliament in 1678, and deprived of the parliamentary franchise in 1696. This project looks at the relationship between the growing exclusion of disfavored religious minorities and the growth of the state. It does so by examining the ways in which governments channeled the anxieties of religious majorities and used them for their own ends. Its subject is the public management of fears.
I am looking for a student to conduct a survey of English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, and French publications and printed images in order to examine the representations of religious minorities. For this project, we will be paying especially close attention to anti-Catholicism in Britain and anti-Protestantism in France. Most of the research will be conducted at Northwestern University, with occasional side trips to the Newberry Library. Knowledge of French or Dutch is an asset but not a requirement. I am seeking a fellow who would be available for the whole year (three quarters).
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Helen TILLEY
“The Wisdom of the Peoples”: African Decolonization, Global Governance, and Cold War Constructions of Traditional Medicine