Featured Fellow: Max Fennell-Chametzky (2025-2026 Nancy Halverson Schless Short-Term Research Fellow)

The Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society supports a diverse community of scholars working on a wide-range of projects in fields including early American history, history of science and technology, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, among others. Additional information about our fellowship programming and other funding opportunities can be found here.

Briefly describe your research project.

My dissertation is a cultural and intellectual history of the “era of ape language” in American (and global) science, roughly concentrated from the 1960s through the 1980s. I draw on published and archival sources to tell the story of how psychologists in the United States leveraged new experimental paradigms and settings to teach great apes (mostly chimpanzees and gorillas) American Sign Language and other symbolic communication systems. I show how these experiments had profound and wide-ranging repercussions for evolutionary theory, language science, and psychological experimentation by tracing the global, material entanglements of primate verbalizations.

What collections did you use while working at the APS?

I worked with three major collections during my short-term fellowship: the Salvador E. Luria Papers, the Ashley Montagu Papers, and the Leonard Carmichael Papers.

Luria, an Italian microbiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1969 for work on viruses, may seem an odd actor of interest for this project; however, Luria was close personal friends with the linguist Noam Chomsky, who was himself a vigorous, if often unwilling, critic of ape language work, and Luria was co-head of a Paris-based research group on human and animal communication, alongside the psychologist David Premack, who had earned acclaim for his symbolic communication work with the chimpanzee Sarah.

The British anthropologist Ashely Montagu frequently wrote on the origins and evolution of language, drumming up controversy over theories on which, it was hoped, ape language instruction might shed some much-needed light.

American psychologist Leonard Carmichael was the long-standing Chair of the Board of Directors of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida, and later was secretary of the Smithsonian Institution vice-president for research at the National Geographic Society. Spanning many institutions and eras of American psychology and primatology, he was an important bridge figure into the era of ape language.

In the future, as needed and as time allows, I hope to return to consult the papers of some early and mid-century linguists (Dell Hymes, Mary Haas, and Martin Joos) as well as the pre-linguistic ape psychologists Wolfgang Köhler and Eugen Tuber.

What’s the most interesting or most exciting thing you found in the collections?

There were so many things! I’ll pick one intriguing item or set of related items from each significant collection I worked with:

In the Luria papers, a series of letters amongst Luria and members of the French research center with which he was associated for some years in the 1970s, the Royaumont Center for the Science of Man, drove home just how, why, and when communication and understanding between French and American academic styles broke down. I’d previously seen some communication to this effect at the National Archives in Paris, but the additional letters in the Luria papers gave new and fuller life to why he and other academics within the United States withdrew, in the middle of the 1970s, from an organization that had so excited them just a few years prior. In short: they differed deeply over styles of acceptable scientific research (empirical Americans, theoretically inclined French) and norms of scientific publication (the Americans were hesitant, the French wanted to publish everything, including informal conference dialogues). The sense of confusion and, at times, betrayal Luria and others in his orbit expressed explains why he, Premack, and others distanced themselves from their French colleagues, and thus why French psychologists, despite their intellectual fascination, were not long for American-style ape language work.

Ashely Montagu had a copy of the second progress report (dated 1975) from Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace and linguist Thomas Bever’s ape language experiment Project Nim. Though I’d already seen this report in the papers of another ape language researcher, I was intrigued to find it in the Montagu papers, and its presence and condition raises as many questions as it does answers. There was no correspondence related to the report in the collection, so I do not know whether he asked for it or it was unsolicited; it had no markings in the marginalia or underlining/highlighting in the text, leaving it possible that he never even read it. I wonder who else received or asked for this report; it is not styled as a grant progress report and bears no such overtures, so it appears to have been generated for the express purpose of pre-circulation. Did Terrace and Bever want to get out the word? Solicit feedback? Maybe even pre-empt potential blowback? It is hard to say, but such a document helps enhance the network of the ape language era.

Continuing the theme of further articulating the previously gleaned, letters in the Carmichael papers helped articulate the transition taking place within language science in the 1960s. The psychologist and linguist Eric H. Lenneberg, perhaps the leading linguistic critic of ape language work in his time, organized a symposium at the International Congress of Psychology in 1963 titled “Language and the Science of Man,” and asked Carmichael to give a paper. While this had been known to me from both the eventual edited volume the panel produced and adventures in the Lenneberg papers, the context surrounding Carmichael’s courting and acceptance remained unknown. It turns out that Carmichael was highly skeptical of his presence in the group, due to his being rather older than many of the other members and, crucially, the only non-expert in language science. Despite, or perhaps because of, these reservations, Lenneberg pressed on, winning Carmichael over and securing a paper from him on the development of language in the individual—only to then turn around and disagree with the paper’s fundamental orientation, suggest a number of changes which would bring Carmichael’s paper more into line with his own, and even change the title of the paper from “language mechanism” to “language capacity,” better reflecting his own sensibilities. Such exchanges and their consequences offer a window, I think, into how young scientists effected a “changing of the guard” in rapidly altering fields.

Do you have any tips or suggestions for future fellows or researchers?

Go to all the Brown Bag talks (as time allows)! Even if they’re not in complete (or even close) harmony with your research, they’re a great venue to meet American Philosophical Society staff, other fellows, and, of course, hear an interesting talk in a low-stakes environment.

Any suggestions for must-see places or things to do in Philadelphia?

I probably didn’t engage in enough Philadelphia tourism during my fellowship because I was too busy enjoying long walks all across the city. So, doing just that would be my recommendation! Philadelphia really is a walking city, and the many different neighborhoods all reward on-foot exploration.
 

Max Fennell-Chametzky is a PhD candidate (ABD) in the Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine (STEAM) field in the Department of History at Stanford University. He works on the history of the behavioral sciences, the history of the life sciences, and the history of their intersections in the United States, France, and Britain from the 19th century to the present. His dissertation project, tentatively titled “Arguments with Apes: Primate Psychology, Linguistic Theory, and the Scientific Search for Human Nature, 1930-2013,” examines the scientific and cultural phenomenon of ape language experiments, performed during the 1960s and 1970s, to reveal a wider struggle over the nature of humanness and the nature of science.