This fall, the John W. Kluge Center in the Thomas Jefferson Building welcomes a distinguished group of new scholars to the Library of Congress. They come to the Library to fill a variety of research positions: Kluge Chair holders; other established chairs; distinguished visiting scholars; Kluge postdoctoral fellows; and postdoctoral fellows supported by other private foundation gifts, as well as independent researchers. Through the Kluge Center, the incoming scholars will conduct research on formalized topics in the Library's comprehensive collections for a period of up to one year.
The scholars in residence at the Kluge Center beginning this fall are Mikhail A. Alexseev, Toni Carbo, Michael G. Chang, Anne E. B. Coldiron, Amy C. Crumpton, Armenuhi Ghambaryan, Ivan Katchanovski, Marek Kwiek, Gerardo Leibner, Kathleen Lynch, Chidibere Nwaubani, Walid Saleh, Iulia D. Shevchenko, Balás Szelényi, Elvira Vilches and Andrei Znamenski. Details on their backgrounds and areas of research follow.
Kluge Fellow Mikhail A. Alexseev
"The Origins of Hostility: Migration, Insecurity, and Ethnic Prejudice at the Russia-China Border" is the chosen research topic of Kluge Fellow Alexseev. He is associate professor in the political science department at San Diego State University. The author of "Center-Periphery Conflict in Post-Soviet Russia: A Federation Imperiled" (St. Martin's Press/Macmillan, 1999), he received his doctorate from the University of Washington in 1996. Alexseev hopes to make extensive use of the resources of both the European and Asian division reading rooms, as well as the Main Reading Room, in the course of his research.
Madison Council Fellow in Library and Information Science Toni Carbo
Carbo, who received her doctorate from Drexel University, has spent many years in the information field. Her work includes extensive experience with information service producers and users (both libraries and database producers) and in research in the areas of information policy and use. She is the former president of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and the Association for Library and Information Science Education. A former member of the U.S. Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure, Carbo served as a U.S. representative to the G-7 Round Table of Business Leaders at the G-7 Information Society Conference in 1995 in Brussels. Carbo has also served as executive director of the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. Carbo recently resigned as dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh in order to return to teaching and research. At the Library of Congress she will focus on "Information Policies Concerning E-government in the United States and the European Union."
Library of Congress Fellow in International Studies Michael G. Chang
Chang is assistant professor of Chinese history at George Mason University. In 2001, Chang received his doctorate in East Asian (Chinese) history from the University of California-San Diego. His article "The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s-1930s" was published in "Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943" in 1999. Using the Library's vast holdings of Chinese local gazetteers ("fangzhi") and genealogies ("jiapu"), Chang has selected "Local Perspectives on the Southern Tours: State-Society Relations in Eighteenth Century China" as his area of research.
Kluge Fellow Anne E. B. Coldiron
Assistant professor in English and faculty member in comparative literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Coldiron received her master's from Old Dominion University and her doctorate in English literature (specializing in the Renaissance period) from the University of Virginia in 1996. She will be using the resources of the European Division and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division's Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection to research her topic, "Between Caxton and Tottel: Verse Translation from French 1476-1557 and Earlier English Renaissance Poetry." This study builds on the interdisciplinary and theoretical conclusions of her first book, "Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles of Orleans: Found in Translation" (University of Michigan Press, 2000).
Kluge Fellow Amy C. Crumpton
At the Kluge Center, Crumpton will be pursuing research on "Barry Commoner and Margaret Mead (1958-1968): Relations Between Science, Democratic Organization, and Social Change." A research archivist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science here in Washington, Crumpton received her doctorate from Virginia Tech in 1999. She will work with the Barry Commoner and Margaret Mead Collections, both of which are located in the Manuscript Division.
International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) Regional Scholar Exchange Program Fellowship Armenuhi Ghambaryan
As recipient of an IREX Fellowship, Ghambaryan will be researching "The Policy of the USA Regarding the Armenian Case (1918-1923)." Ghambaryan is a scientific worker at the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia and senior lecturer at the "David Anhakht" Humanities University in Yerevan, Armenia.
Kluge Fellow Ivan Katchanovski
A native of Ukraine, Katchanovski received his doctorate in public policy from George Mason University in 2001. Using the Library's significant Russian and Polish collections as well as other archival and published materials, Katchanovski hopes to examine the mechanism of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. His topic of research at the Library is titled "Soviet Prisoner's Dilemma: The Politics of Mass Terror."
Kluge Fellow Marek Kwiek
Kwiek will be studying "The Reinvention of the Institution of the University in the Global Age." In 1995, he received his doctorate from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, where he is a professor in the philosophy department. In 1999, he was the recipient of an International OSI Policy Fellowship from the Central European University in Budapest to work on a research project titled "The Identity Crisis of the Institution of the University—Polish Higher Education in Transition." Kwiek has since broadened his interest in the role of the university in the post-modern age, and he believes that the Library is the only place in the world where he can find all of the materials that he needs in one place.
Kluge Fellow Gerardo Leibner
Leibner plans to use the Library's premiere collection of books, brochures, journals and related materials published by the Communist Party of Uruguay in pursuance of his research topic, "Ideology, Action, and Social Views of the Uruguayan Communist Party, 1945-73." In 1998, Leibner received his doctorate from the University of Tel Aviv, where he is a lecturer in the history department. In addition, he is on the editorial board of Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe (EIAL). His book, "El Mito del Socialismo Indígena en Mariátegui. Fuentes y Contextos Peruanos," was published in 1999.
Visiting Fellow Kathleen Lynch
Executive director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Lynch has been awarded a research leave from the Folger for 12 months to do research at the Kluge Center. Her work will focus on a scholarly book-in-progress on the uses of autobiographical narrative in 17th-century Britain and its colonial outposts which is provisionally titled "A Pattern or More: The Uses of Religious Experience in Seventeenth-Century Britain."
Kluge Fellow Chidibere Nwaubani
Nwaubani is assistant professor of African history at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Author of "The United States and Decolonization in West Africa, 1950-1960" (University of Rochester Press, 2001), Nwaubani received his doctorate in African history from the University of Toronto in 1995. Nwaubani will focus on "Nigeria: The Politics of Decolonization, 1937-60" and will make use of the Library's important collection of older Nigerian newspapers, which are exceptionally rich for the scholarly study of the process of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa.
Library of Congress Rockefeller Humanities Fellow in Islamic Studies Walid Saleh
Saleh will be examining "A History of Islamic Apocalyptic Imagination." Assistant professor at Middlebury College when he applied for the fellowship, Saleh has recently moved to the University of Toronto. Saleh, who received a doctorate in Islamic studies from Yale University in 2001, believes that without an understanding of the relationship between Sunnism and apocalypticism, any attempt at understanding the world of Islam is incomplete. He will be making extensive use of the Library's Near Eastern collections.
Kluge Fellow Iulia D. Shevchenko
"Parliamentary Autonomy in Post-Communist Countries: A Comparative Study" is the focus of Shevchenko's research. A native of Russia, Shevchenko received her doctorate from the European University at St. Petersburg where she is a research associate. The author of numerous publications in both Russian and English, Shevchenko plans on extending her practical knowledge of the functioning and working of the U.S. Congress by using THOMAS, the Library's legislative information database on the Internet as well as the Library's collection of books and periodicals that were not available to researchers in Central and Eastern Europe under communist regimes.
Library of Congress Fellow in International Studies Balás Szelényi
Szelényi received his doctorate from the University of California-Los Angeles in 1998. An independent scholar, Szelenyi hopes to complete his research on "The Social Roots of Ethnic Conflict: The German Diaspora in East Central Europe." He received both an American Council of Learned Societies Postdoctoral Fellowship (2001-2002) and a Woodrow Wilson Center Research Scholarship (2001).
Library of Congress Fellow in International Studies Elvira Vilches
An assistant professor of Spanish at North Carolina State University, Vilches received her doctorate in Spanish from Cornell University in 1998. She hopes to use the resources of the Hispanic Division to study the cultural consumption of New World exotica and its role in early modern Spain's culture, politics, and economics in a project titled "The Economy of the Marvelous: Transatlantic Values and Fictions of the Spanish Empire, 1492-1665."
Kluge Fellow Andrei Znamenski
Znamenski will be studying "Athabaskan Indians and Russian Orthodoxy (1840s-1917)," a project to examine the role that the Russian Orthodox Church performed in the belief and culture of a group of south-central Alaskan Native Americans. Znamenski, the author of "Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820-1917," (Greenwood Press, 1999), received his doctorate from the University of Toledo in 1997. Presently he is associate professor of history at Alabama State University in Montgomery.
For more information about the John W. Kluge Center, contact the Office of Scholarly Programs, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave., S.E., Washington DC 20540-4860; telephone (202) 707-3302, fax (202) 707-3595, scholarly@loc.gov, www.loc.gov/kluge.
