The Leon and Joanne V.C. Knopoff Library Resident Research Fellowship was endowed by Dr. and Mrs. Knopoff to support Library Fellows working on-site in the Society’s history of science collections, with preference for the physical sciences, including mathematics. Dr. Knopoff is Professor Emeritus of Physics and Geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Although I had completed 18 months of field stay and written up my results, there was an important piece of research that occurred to me in the midst of turning my dissertation into a book manuscript.  The APS Franklin Grant provided me just the resources I needed to return to Pakistan to do additional research.  My book has benefited enormously from this rare opportunity."  Naveeda Khan's manuscript is titled The Promise of Pakistan: Locating Muslim Aspiration, Skepticism and the Ordinary.  Her central claims are that, contrary to standing scholarship, Pakistan had a founding vision of inaugurating Islamic modernity.  Her book attempts to draw out the contours of this aspiration, suggesting how the violence of skepticism and an enduring commitment to ordinary life also arise from this founding desire.  Dr. Khan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.  (Franklin Grant)

"The Franklin Research Grant was crucial in making my research trip to Belgium possible.  Without it, I would never have had the opportunity to expand my research on the mulatto children, and to finish an article (Interracial Unions, Mixed Identities: Mulatto Children in the Belgian Congo, 1890-1960) that is currently being considered for publication."   Dr. Tshimanga-Kashama, a member of the history department at the University of Nevada, Reno, focuses his research on a significant but relatively unstudied aspect of colonial history, that of Afro-European children in the Belgian Congo and their impact on discourses of race, identity, gender, and colonialism.  (Franklin Grant)

"The APS/British Academy grant to conduct research in London was tremendously helpful.  I was able to obtain rare and difficult-to-find materials from the Royal Asiatic Society library's collection of Malay materials, and I had a productive summer reading in the East India Company archives at the British Library.  This grant will have a significant impact on the book I'm currently writing."  Su Fang Ng's book, Global Renaissance: Early Modern Empire and Classicism from the British Isles to the Malay Archipelago, examines how Greco-Roman models of empire became part of native histories of early modern island kingdoms in the far west and the far east--the British Isles and island Southeast Asia--and in turn, how these claims to classicism shaped English relations with Southeast Asians in the early modern East Indies spice trade.  Dr. Ng is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. (Franklin Grant)

“The Franklin Research Grant has enabled us to use sophisticated, computer-assisted methods to reconstruct most of the missing parts of this significant human fossil from Hofmeyr. This new information will enable us to shed additional light on the timing and appearance of modern humans at the beginning of the Later Stone Age in Africa.”  Frederick E. Grine’s project, Stereolithographic Reconstruction and 3-D Radiographic Analysis of a Late Pleistocene Human Skull from South Africa, which was published in Science in 2007, was recognized by Time magazine as one of the top ten science stories for that year.  According to Dr. Grine, Professor of Anthropology and Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University (SUNY), a nearly complete human cranium was discovered some 50 years ago in a dry river channel near the town of Hofmeyr, South Africa. This specimen has been dated to approximately 36,000 years before present, a significant finding in view of the lack of human fossils from the Late Pleistocene of sub-Saharan Africa, the time when, and place where, the modern humans who migrated out to inhabit the rest of the world first appeared. The Hofmeyr cranium had been seriously damaged since its discovery, with large portions of the face and braincase missing.  Study of the fossil, insofar as it is preserved, revealed intriguingly close affinities to penecontemporaneous crania from the Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia.

"The APS Franklin Grant made all the difference in the amount of time I was able to spend on-site in Pompeii, and subsequently how well I came to understand the archaeological evidence. Instead of a few days and a cursory check of the archaeological material, I could spend weeks and work my way through the taverns, houses, and public buildings where people left their mark, wrote about their travels, and proclaimed their civic pride. I even discovered inscriptions that had never been published." Rebecca Benefiel's project, Pompeii and her Neighbors: Ancient Graffiti and Regional Interaction, examined graffiti as a window onto the dynamic social interactions and economic networks among inhabitants of different communities across the populous region of Campania.  Dr. Benefiel is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Washington and Lee University.  (Franklin Grant)

Medallion with Portrait of Benjamin Franklin after Jean-Baptiste Nini. The APS Museum collection contains more than 300 medals, medallions and coins dating from the late 18th until the mid 20th century.

In 2007 Dr. James W. Valentine, Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, contributed to the Society his collection of nearly 4,500 volumes of the printed works of Charles Darwin in more than 25 languages of the world.  The Valentine/Darwin Collection promises to be a trove of information about the ways in which Darwin’s powerful ideas moved across cultures and through time. Dr. Valentine’s goal was to place the collection, assembled over 50 years, in a repository where it would have appropriate context, where it would be kept intact as a collection, and where it would be accessible to scholars.  The APS Library, with its vast history of science collections, including the largest collection of Darwin's manuscripts in North America, was pleased to accept the collection on this basis.

"The APS library fellowship was particularly valuable for two reasons. First, as a busy employed physician coming to study the history of medicine late in my career, I needed the protected, uninterrupted research time away from my practice obligations that the fellowship afforded. Second, I found the APS collection of the papers of the major human geneticists of the 20th century ideal for providing exactly the material I needed to supplement and enhance what I had found in Minnesota."  Neal Holtan's project, Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Public Health Genetics in Mid-Twentieth Century Minnesota,  is the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation in the University of Minnesota's Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.  The dissertation will describe the Minnesota Eugenics Society (1926-1938), the Dight Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Minnesota (1941-1986), the Minnesota Human Genetics League (1945-1993), and the Human Genetics Unit at the Minnesota Department of Health (1959-present), the first genetics unit in a state health department in the United States. (Library Fellowship)