The Early Research Initiative invites applications for two Morgan Library & Museum graduate fellowships (Summer 2020).  These $4,000 fellowships will be offered to Graduate Center Ph.D. students from any program with primary research interests related to the collections at the Morgan Library & Museum. The primary responsibilities of the award winners will be to collaborate with curators, librarians, and catalogers from the Morgan in order to process uncatalogued collections, improve public access to documents and related materials, gain experience in creating and organizing collections or exhibition planning, research, and design.

Application Deadline: Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 5pm

 

Applicants are invited to take one of the following approaches:

 

(1) Apply to conduct one of the specific projects detailed below. This year the Morgan offers CUNY Fellowships in the following areas: musical compositions by Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and others working in Paris during the Belle Époque; works of contemporary artist Nina Katchadourian; 18th- and 19th-century extra-illustrated books, and letters of Maria Tunno, John Ruskin and others.

 

Composers of the Belle Époque (Department of Music Manuscripts and Printed Music)

The Morgan holds a rich trove of autograph music manuscripts by composers working in Paris during the Belle Époque (ca. 1871-1914), including Fauré, Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Dukas, and Stravinsky. This project seeks a candidate to research connections and mutual influences between these manuscripts and the literary and artistic environment in which these composers flourished. The project will involve researching primary sources and summarizing relevant scholarly material. The candidate should read music and have broad familiarity with Western music history, though expertise in this specific era is not required.

 

Nina Katchadourian Exhibition Project (Department of Photography)

In fall 2022, as part of an ongoing series of contemporary artist projects, the department of Photography will mount an exhibition in which Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968) combines her work with objects drawn from all areas of the Morgan’s holdings. Katchadourian’s interdisciplinary approach leads her into farflung, unexpected fields of learning and craft. The Fellow’s research, conducted at the direction of the artist and the curator, will reflect the great range and variety of both the collections and Katchadourian’s interests and practices.

 

19th-century collecting and extra-illustrated volumes (Department of Printed Books and Bindings)

A common practice in the nineteenth century was to create extra-illustrated books. A biography or general text on a single author, artist, historical figure, or literary work would be expanded with the addition of letters, manuscripts, prints/drawings, and ephemera related to that author, work, and period. This project would include choosing one or more works from the collection related to the applicant’s area of interest and creating a finding aid of the additional material in the volumes. Historical figures in the collection include: Charles Dickens; George Gordon, Lord Byron; William Makepeace Thackeray; Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington; also general works on 17th/18th-century British theatre; the English Civil War; and American history. Applicants should have experience working with rare and fragile material and be able to read 18th/19th-century handwriting, predominantly English but also some familiarity with Latin, French, and/or German is desirable. Knowledge of relief and intaglio printing techniques is desirable, but not required.

 

Nineteenth-century English letters: research and cataloging (Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts; Department of Collection Information Systems)

The Morgan is engaged in a major project to create detailed catalog descriptions of literary and historical letters from the collection of scholar Gordon N. Ray, who bequeathed his holdings to the Morgan. The Fellow will be tasked with deciphering, researching, and describing a group of 40–75 items from the Ray collection. The Fellow will have the choice of working on one of four possible groups of letters, including those written by critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), author Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), clergyman and humorist Sydney Smith (1771–1845), and Maria Tunno (1783–1853), a resident of Buckinghamshire with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including correspondents living on the Continent. Working under the supervision of a senior Morgan cataloger, the Fellow will produce useful enhancements to the Morgan’s catalog while gaining insights into professional methods for processing primary source material. Applicants should specify which group of letters they wish to work on and articulate why they would like to focus on it.

 

(2) Apply to conduct a research project of your own choosing that requires the use of primary source material (manuscripts, rare books, music, archives, and other works of art) in the Morgan’s collections. Students are especially encouraged to submit proposals related to modern art, literature and publishing (making use, for example, of the Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives, the Carter Burden Collection of American Literature, and the Man Booker Prize Collection), see descriptions of collections below.

 

• The Pierre Matisse Gallery was founded in New York in 1931 by Pierre Matisse (1900-1989), son of Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Records in this collection document the history of the gallery over nearly six decades, as well as aspects of Matisse’s own life and that of his famous father. Pierre Matisse played a chief role in the art world of the twentieth century, particularly in his introduction of modern European artists to the American public. The archives comprise 227 cubic feet of correspondence (much of it unpublished), photographs, exhibition scrapbooks and catalogs, stock books, inventories, and works on paper. The painters and sculptors who were the mainstay of the gallery — Balthus, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miro, and Matisse’s childhood friend Yves Tanguy — were joined by a diverse group of other artists, among them Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Manuel Millares, Manuel Rivera, Antonio Saura, Rufino Tamayo and Zao Wou‐ki. Pierre Matisse also represented such prominent women artists as Leonora Carrington, Loren MacIver and Kay Sage. Matisse’s involvement in collecting and selling African, Oceanic, Mexican, and Peruvian art is also documented in the collection.

 

• The Carter Burden collection of American literature contains materials related to major modern American authors since Henry James, including Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams. Additional strengths of the collection comprise inscribed copies, post-war poetry broadsides, ephemera, yearbooks, and magazines.

 

• The Man Booker Prize Collection includes approximately 20 cubic feet of manuscript and archival material documenting or related to the history and administration of the Booker Prize, specific titles submitted to the prize, and many of the authors, judges, publishers, editors and others associated with the prize. In addition, the collection includes hundreds of first editions, variants, proofs, and subsequent editions of every shortlisted, longlisted, and winning book between 1969 and 2012—some of which are annotated by authors or judges.

 

Fellowship recipients will be required to be in residence for 120 hours over the summer of 2020 at the Morgan working for scheduled times from 9:30 to 4pm on Monday through Friday. In addition, recipients will be required to do a brief public presentation on their work and write a blog post about their experiences at the end of the relevant period before the end of the Fall 2020 semester. Additional opportunities for social media contributions to the Morgan’s accounts are also possible.

 

To apply please send a letter of interest describing your research interests and related experience with specific reference to one of the projects described below, a c.v., a current Graduate Center transcript (Students may submit the unofficial student copy that can be printed from CUNYFirst), and a letter of support from your primary advisor.

 

Instructions for submitting your application:

• Please combine the above materials (except for the letter of recommendation) into a SINGLE file (either as a pdf document or a word document).

 

Use the following format when naming your document: Last Name, First Name, Program

 

• Email your file directly to fellowshipapps@gc.cuny.edu

 

Please use your graduate center email address when sending the file.

 

Instructions for Faculty Recommenders

• Prepare your reference letter as a regular word or pdf document.
• Please use the following format when naming your document:

Student Last Name, First Name

• Email your file directly to fellowshipapps@gc.cuny.edu

 

Application Deadline: February 18, 2020, 5:00pm