2015 Research Travel Award Winners

The Eberly Family Special Collections Library is pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 research travel awards program. All winners will visit the Special Collections Library between June and August.

Albert M. Petska Eighth Air Force Archives winner:

• David Cain, 2nd Air Division Memorial Library & the University of East Anglia. Mr. Cain will be researching the social interaction of the 8th USAAF with local British people in the East of England between 1942 - 1945, with special focus on the relationship of 8th USAAF service persons to landscape and local people in Britain.

Dorothy Foehr Huck award winners:

• Bob Hodges, University of Washington. Mr. Hodges will be researching 19th and 20th century utopian literature in support of his dissertation Figurations of Modernity in Antebellum U. S. Romances.  His work wagers that reckoning with New Americanist revisionist criticisms of the romance offers a chance to reconstruct the romance’s reparative and sometimes utopian compensations for its imbrication with antebellum U.S. economic and technological modernizations.
• J. Wesley Leckrone, Widener University. Prof. Leckrone is writing a book entitled "Governing the Commonwealth: Politics, Policy and Executive Power in Pennsylvania.”  The primary topic is the use of gubernatorial power by the five executives elected since 1980.
• Angelique Szymanek, SUNY Binghamton. Ms. Szymanek’s topic is “Representations of Rape in Visual Culture.” Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between feminist art production and the anti-rape movement in the U.S. throughout the 1970s and she will be using the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection to support her work.

Helen F. Faust Women Writers award winners: 

• Amanda Stuckey, College of William & Mary. Ms. Stuckey  will be researching bodily behavior in the nineteenth-century boy book. She studies the female authorship of children's books in order to understand how the genre of the boy book emerged alongside mid to late nineteenth-century understandings of what constituted able-bodied, self-controlled, disciplined children's bodies and behavior.
• Arielle Zibrak, University of Wyoming. Prof. Zibrak’s topic is “Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Counter-Traditions in the Age of Progress.” Her research focuses on current criticism of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century transatlantic fiction emphasizes its connection to the political reform movements (abolition, suffrage, temperance, etc.) that so dominated our conception of the period. Her book project attempts to dislodge the critical myth that popular literature and political reform were wholly coherent movements by highlighting significant writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton who, while committed to social change, wrote against reform, and its underrepresented externalities.

During their research visit, the winners will be invited to give a short, informal presentation about their research that will be open to the public.