CUNY Graduate Center/Morgan Library and Museum Graduate Fellowships

Application Deadline: Friday, March 1, 2019

 

The Early Research Initiative invites applications for two Morgan Library & Museum graduate fellowships (Summer 2019).  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, and to gain experience in creating and organizing collections.

 

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: 18th- and 19th-century extra-illustrated books; letters of Sir Walter Scott, John Ruskin and others; James Joyce and censorship; and Peter Hujar unpublished interviews.

 

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, with possible selections including letters of critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), Edward Freeman (historian, architectural artist, and Liberal politician, 1823–1892), Maria Knox (an English woman living in British Colonial India during the 1810s), author Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), or Sydney Smith, (clergyman and humorist, 1771–1845). 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.

 

James Joyce’s Ulysses and literary censorship (Department of Printed Books and Fine Bindings)

2022 marks the centenary of the landmark publication of Joyce’s Ulysses. The novel’s influence on twentieth-century literature cannot be overstated. Its complex publishing history played a significant role in the history of little magazines, censorship, and literary piracies, particularly in the United States. This project seeks a candidate to research and compile annotated bibliographies addressing Joyce’s works, gather relevant scholarly articles into electronic form, and summarize cultural instances and legal histories of modern censorship in American and European publishing. The comparative evaluation of duplicate material in the Morgan’s Joyce collections and the creation of study images may also comprise part of the project.

 

19th-century collecting and extra-illustrated volumes (Department of Printed Books and Fine 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.

 

Peter Hujar Collection (Department of Photography)

The Morgan recently acquired Linda Rosenkrantz’s original, unedited transcript of an interview she conducted with Peter Hujar in December, 1974, in which he recounts all he did the previous day, from waking to going to bed. The project will consist of compiling and annotating all materials in the Peter Hujar Collection that relate to his comments: contact sheets of work he shot that day and that month, biographical information on the portrait subjects he mentions, relevant correspondence, print ephemera, etc. This aim of this Day-in-the-Life close-up is to help map the artist’s unique placement among creative figures in Manhattan in the mid-1970s, at the moment he was beginning work on his monograph Portraits in Life and Death (December, 1976). Applicants should demonstrate interest in and familiarity with the context of the photographer’s career. The Peter Hujar Collection consists of correspondence, photographic prints and contact sheets, snapshots, business records, publications and art on paper that document the life and work of the American photographer Peter Hujar (1934-1987). The collection spans the years 1950-2000; the bulk of the materials date from the late 1950s to the early 1980s.

 

 

(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 literature and publishing (making use, for example, of the Carter Burden Collection of American Literature, the Paris Review Archive, and the Man Booker Prize Collection), see brief descriptions of collections below.

 

• The Carter Burden collection of American literature contains first editions of every major modern American author since Henry James, including Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Edith Wharton, Vladimir Nabokov, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams.

 

• The Paris Review literary magazine was founded in Paris in 1953 by Peter Matthiessen (1927–), Harold L. Humes (1926–1992), and George Plimpton (1927–2003). Plimpton was the first editor, a position he held from the time he graduated from Cambridge University until his death. Other editors in the early years included John Train, managing editor; Thomas Guinzburg, New York editor; William Pène de Bois, art editor; and Donald Hall, the first poetry editor. The Paris Review Archives (1952–2003) consists of general and editorial correspondence generated during the foundation and the day-to-day operations of the magazine; manuscript and edited fiction and poetry submissions; news clippings; photographs; prints; bound issues; and sound and video recordings. The Archives documents the decisions made in producing each issue, as well as the careers of its staff and many of the important twentieth-century writers and artists who contributed to The Paris Review.

 

• 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.

 

Fellowship recipients will be required to be in residence for 120 hours over the summer of 2019 at the Morgan working for scheduled times between 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 2019 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:

1)     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

2)     Email your file directly to fellowshipapps@gc.cuny.edu

Please use your graduate center email address when sending the file and put “Morgan” in the subject line.

Instructions for Faculty Recommenders

1)     Prepare your reference letter as a regular word or pdf document.

2)     Please use the following format when naming your document:

Student Last Name, First Name

3)     Email your file directly to fellowshipapps@gc.cuny.edu

 

Application Deadline: Friday, March 1^st, 2019