Research Projects with Professor RL Watson

During the coming year, Professor Watson will be working on two projects and has need of an assistant as she completes research on an edited volume and critical article for The American Folk Art Museum and begins research for her second novel manuscript. The first project is titled Unnamed Figures, which is concerned with the presence and absence of Black figures in early New England (17th-19th century) amateur portraiture. Her editorial contribution to this volume will include a chapter that reflects on the possibilities of selected figures depicted in the show. The second project she has planned is for an historical novel, set in pre-Revolutionary Haiti. She would like specially to consider mawon communities and their relationships to those enslaved by the French. An assistant would continue in building an existing annotated bibliography to support this research.

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Research Projects with Professor Katy Reedy

Professor Reedy is seeking research assistants for critical and editorial work largely centered on the intersections between early modern/Renaissance literature and science. Her first scholarly project explores changing concepts of contagion and illness during the plague epidemics in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. She will need assistance on research for chapters of her monograph on the plague and Shakespeare's theater. Her second project involves critical research into early concepts of the "imagination" and illness that come into play in Shakespeare's depiction of sexual violence. This chapter will be part of an edited volume on the "Imagination and Images" in Renaissance Literature. Finally, she is editing an edition of Thomas Middleton's Triumphs of Health and Prosperity for the Map of Early Modern England online. Assistants will help with all aspects of the editorial process.

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Research Projects with Professor Henry Carrigan

This coming year Professor Carrigan will be working on his book about Americana musician Emmylou Harris, Emmylou Harris: Heart and Soul of a Poet. He'll be doing research and writing for that book, which provides a substantive overview of Harris’ music as it evolves from folk to country and bluegrass to alt-country and explores her movement from song interpreter to songwriter and song collaborator, and co-writer. Professor Carrigan’s research fellow will conduct research in the digital archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, locate and distill journal, magazine, and newspaper articles and reviews related to Emmylou Harris' life and work, as well as the life and work of the musicians and artists who have played with her, and arrange interviews with key individuals whose work is important to the overall project.

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Research Projects with Professor Joshua Corey

Professor Corey seeks one or two Fielding Fellows to assist him with two projects in the coming year. One is the preparation for publication of a new autobiographical novel, How Long Is Now, juxtaposing the narrator’s quest for literary ancestry in Europe and Morocco with the imagined courtship of his parents in 1960s New York City; assistance with proofreading and developing a publicity campaign is needed. The other project is research for a new book that is in its nascent stages: a novel about the Jewish American boxer Barney Ross and his lifelong friendship with Jack Ruby, the man who killed JFK’s assassin.

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Research Projects with Professor Carla Arnell

Prof. Arnell is working on several projects related to early twentieth-century British literature and spirituality. One project involves continued work on her book-in-progress about the rise of the “mystical novel” in the Edwardian era. In the coming year, her research assistants will contribute to her chapters on A.E. Waite and Arthur Machen/Charles Williams, with the former chapter examining how and to what end Waite adapts occult or other esoteric spiritual traditions within his Christian mystical fiction and the latter comparing Machen’s and Williams’s mythopoetic use of Arthurian literature in their mystical novels. A second project involves continued work on an annotated edition of Charles Williams’s Arthurian poetry. Student work may entail database searching for relevant secondary literature, creating and maintaining bibliographies, previewing new sources by writing précis for the faculty mentor’s review, and generally consulting on the direction of the chapters/essays in progress. The annotation project involves researching obscure or unfamiliar phrases in Williams’s poetry and drafting preliminary explanatory notes for readers of his poetry. It might also entail accessing a local archive of Williams’s original documents.