Announcing our 2025-2026 Library & Museum Fellowship Cohort

The American Philosophical Society’s Library & Museum is excited to announce its 2025-2026 fellowship recipients! This year, the Society has awarded six long-term fellowships and 49 short-term fellowships and internships for research in the history of science, Indigenous and Native American studies, and early American history. 

This year, the Library & Museum also welcomed its second Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative Career Pathways Fellow (awarded in 2024), a program for postdoctoral scholars with expertise related to Native American and Indigenous Studies and allied fields who are interested in pursuing professional opportunities at libraries, museums, and cultural organizations. Fellows are based at the Library & Museum’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR), which aims to promote greater collaboration among scholars, archives, and Indigenous communities throughout the Americas. 

As the American Philosophical Society’s Assistant Director of Library & Museum Programs, Brenna Holland had to say:

"Our archival collections are brought to life through the incredible research undertaken by fellowship recipients. Their thoughtful projects and creativity constantly reveal new dimensions to our holdings."

The Director of the Library & Museum, Michelle McDonald, is just as excited: 

"I am pleased to welcome the 2025-26 APS fellows. You are joining a wonderful network of fellows past and present and I look forward to meeting each of you and learning more about your research."

Learn more about the American Philosophical Society's fellowships and how to apply on the APS website. Congratulations to all of our recipients!

Long-Term Fellows

John C. Slater Predoctoral Fellowship in the History of Science

• Won Jeon, University of California, Santa Cruz, "Project for a Cybernetic Psychology: A History of Learning and Language Processing, 1840 to the present"

Friends of the APS Predoctoral Fellowship 

• Mariela Abigail "Abi" Chi Baack, Pennsylvania State University, "Sociolinguistic variation in Mayan bilingual communities"

Mellon Foundation NASI Predoctoral Fellowship

• Cynthia Wilson (Diné), University of California - Berkeley, "Historicizing Contested Rangelands, Indigenous Mobility, and Food Systems: Navajo Genealogies, Linguistics, and Land Use at Bears Ears (1860-1960)"

Mellon Foundation NASI Postdoctoral Fellowship

• Bruno Seraphin, University of Connecticut, "Fires Beyond Crisis: Colonialism and the Resurgence of Indigenous Burning in Karuk Country"

Mellon Foundation NASI Career Pathways Fellowship

• Fátima Valdivia Ramírez, APS, "Drug Trafficking in Tarahumara. Colonial continuities and mestizo criminal masculinities at the base of the modern Mexican colonial fragmented state"

David Center for the American Revolution Predoctoral Fellowship

• Blake McGready, The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Making Nature's Nation: The Revolutionary War and Environmental Interdependence in New York, 1775–1783”

David Center for the American Revolution Postdoctoral Fellowship

• Sarah Pearlman Shapiro, Brown University, “Restorative Violence: Women's Communities of Care in Revolutionary New England”

Short-Term Fellows

David Center for the American Revolution Short-Term Resident Research Fellows

• Donovan Fifield, University of Tübingen, “Arrears of Empire: Merchant Competition and Imperial Politics in the Colonial American Northeast, 1698-1787”
• Zachary Deibel, Virginia Military Institute, “The Revolutionary Curriculum War: Knowledge and Power in Early America”
• Greg Brooking, Fulton County Public Schools, Atlanta, GA, “Henry Laurens: A Southern Founder”
• Zoe Waldman, William & Mary, “Landscapes of Power: The Meaning of Treaties in Eastern North America, 1750-1790”

David Center for the American Revolution Short-Term International Research Fellows

• Irma Toti, Université Paris 8 and Università Roma Tre, “Giovanni Valentino Mattia Fabbroni papers, ca. 1770s-1875: a major documentary contribution to the knowledge of the role of “cultural brokers” through the British Atlantic area in the last decades of the 18th century.”
• Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, University of Sao Paulo and George Washington University, “Before Common Sense: Thomas Paine as Editor (1775-1776)”
• Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Université Paris 8, “Indépendance. La naissance des Etats-Unis, 1774-1776”
• Emilie Mitran, University of Toulon, “Engaging with the French Revolution in the United States: A Reflection on Politics, Diplomacy and Regional Cultures (1780s-1989)”

Swan Foundation Short-Term Resident Research Fellowship for Revolutionary-Era Material Culture

• Jenna Hardin, William & Mary, “Cupid’s Dart: Failed Romantic Relationships in Early America, 1750-1800"
• Justin Cherry, George Washington's Mount Vernon, “Biscuit, Bread and Disrepair, The bread that fed Washington's Army and the ovens it was baked in 1777-1781”
• Jacqueline Beatty, York College of Pennsylvania, “Engendering Orientalism in the Empire of Liberty”

Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) Undergraduate Interns

Azalea Cisco (Mescalero Apache Tribe), Institute of American Indian Arts
Amber Nobriga (Kanaka Maoli), Yale University
Avery Yara London (Uchinaanchu), Pomona College

Indigenous Community Research Fund Recipients

• Fernando David Márquez Duarte
• José Guarcax
• Talena Atfield

NASI Digital Knowledge Sharing Fellowship

• Brandon Castle (Ketchikan Indian Community), University of Massachusetts Amherst, "Building a Tsimshian Bibliography and Resource Guide for Cultural Revitalization"
• Lily McEwen, University of Missouri Columbia, "Reindigenizing Amskapii Pikanni Artifacts"
• María Angélica García Hernández (Mixtec), Rennes 2 University, “From the analysis of a collection of traditional narrations to its appropriation by the Mixtec indigenous community"
• Nikki Wilcox, Western Kentucky University, "Mapping Indigenous Kentucky"
  Alexander Olson, Western Kentucky University, "Mapping Indigenous Kentucky"

Barra Foundation Fellowship

• Rachel Walker, University of Hartford, “Free Radicals: Fringe Thinkers and the Fight for Liberty in Nineteenth-Century America”
  Audrey Ke Zhao, University of California, Santa Cruz, “The Ginseng Trade and Pennsylvania Merchants in the Canton System”

Daythal L. Kendall Fellowship

• Yulia Fayzrakhmanova, Vitus Bering Kamchatka State University, “Linguistic and Cultural Diversity of Kamchatka in Synchrony and Diachrony of Languages and Culture”
• Nicolas Barnum, Tulane University, “Latinizing Mayan or Mayanizing Latin?: K'iche'an Language Grammars as Tools of Evangelization in Colonial Guatemala”

Friends of the APS Fellowship

• Sam Wagner, New York University, “Ancient Bones and Modern Science: Fossil Collecting in the Nineteenth-Century United States”

Fedwa Malti-Douglas Fellowship

• Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania, “Repopulate: Disaster Planning and the Future of Sex”

Nancy Halverson Schless Fellowship

• Max Fennell-Chametzky, Stanford University, “Arguments with Apes: Psychology, Linguistics, and the Scientific Search for Human Beings' Place in Nature, 1913-2013”

William T. Golden Fellowship

• Reynolds Hahamovitch, University of Michigan, “The Space Age: Horizons of the Future in the Cold War United States”

Leon and Joanne V.C. Knopoff Fellowship

• Eric Ross, University of Massachusetts Amherst, “Choosing Genocide: Scientific Ethics, Agency, and Complicity in the Early Atomic Age, 1939-1957”
• Priyamvada Nambrath, University of Pennsylvania, “Triangulating Pedagogy, Patronage and Innovation in the Kerala School of Mathematics”

Eugene Garfield Fellowship

• Mia Levenson, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “Empirical Spectacles: Performing Science in the Age of Eugenics”
• Michael Robinson, University of Hartford, “Out There: Scientists, Exoplanets, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life”
  Gabriel Vanzo Rodrigues, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, “The South American Life of Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson (1930–1960)”

Mellon Foundation Fellowship

• Patrick McCray, University of California, Santa Barbara, “The Habitability Project”
• Kameika Murphy, Stockton University, “Currents of Liberty: Revolutionary Émigrés to Jamaica and their Contributions to Afro-Caribbean Civil Society 1775-1840”
• Clare Byers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Forgotten Journeys: The French Bestsellers That Shaped American Exploration”
• Dannie Brice, Duke University, “Imperial Grounds: Coffee, Entangled Empires, and the British Military Occupation of Saint-Domingue”
• Shealynn Hendry, University of Cambridge, “"I am Half Republican": The National Character(s) of Involuntary Exiles, 1783-1825”

François André Michaux Fund Fellowship

• Valentine Delrue, Yale University, CUNY, “Seeds as soothsayers? Phenological observations in the U.S.A., 1770-1870”

Edward C. Carter II Fellowship

• Agnès Trouillet, Université Paris Nanterre, “The role of forts in the political history and economy of the Delaware Valley, from 1626 to the first decade of the 18th century”

William S. Willis Fellowship

• Nayeli Riano, Georgetown University, “A Mirror of Enlightenment: Reconceptualizing Civilization and Barbarism in Latin America”
• Robert Diaz, University of Michigan, “Colonizing Childhood, Nurturing Nationhood: Philippine Youths, Sciences of Human Health and Development, and U.S. Imperialism, 1898-1946”
• Travis Meyer, Pennsylvania State University, “Tradition, Experience, and Maya Catholicisms in Colonial Highland Guatemala”
• Jeffrey Adams, Syracuse University, “Archival Earth: Planetary Media in the Nineteenth-Century United States”
• Grace Eberhardt, University of Illinois, “Categorical Instabilities: Bureaucratic, Biological, and Statistical Constructions of Latinos and Mixed-Race People in the United States, 1890 - 1967”
• Fabian Olan, Independent Scholar, “The Cultural Landscape of a Colonial Frontier, Visions from the East of Yucatan: 16th-19th centuries”
• Claire Lavarreda, Northeastern University, “Cultural Transformation in the Process of Text Production: Indigenous Catholicism in New France and New Spain, 1521-1701”