The Center for Mark Twain Studies announced the 2022 Class of Quarry Farm Fellows
Elmira, NY (01/19/2022) — The Center for Mark Twain Studies announced this year's class of Quarry Farm fellowships, which are open to scholars working in the field of Mark Twain Studies at any career stage. The fellows will stay at Quarry Farm for 2-4 weeks and work on academic and creative projects.
The fellowship program reflects Mark Twain's insatiable curiosity. Scholars in the field of literature and history as well as any academic or creative field are encouraged to apply. Fellowship projects have included cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, environmental science, political science, economics, and the creative arts.
2022 Quarry Farm Fellows (See CMTS announcement for additional details):
- Elizabeth Cantalamessa, PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Miami. As part of her research, she will delve into Twain's archives and gain a better understanding of the historical figures that inspired him, his self-conception as a humorist, and his remarks on the limits of traditional "straight-faced" political deliberation.
- Max Chapnick, PhD candidate in American and English literature at Boston University. At Quarry Farm, he plans to work on the section of his dissertation focusing on three late-nineteenth-century time travel narratives: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and H. G. Wells's Time Machine (1895).
- Cassio de Oliveira, assistant professor of Russian in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University. He is currently conducting research for his second monograph, Mark Twain's Mississippi Writings in the Russian Imagination, which focuses on the reception, translation, and adaptations of Mark Twain's works in Russia.
- Jodi DeBruyne and Mallory Howard, the Mark Twain House & Museum's director of collections and assistant curator respectively share the responsibility for the care, exhibition, and interpretation of the Mark Twain House and the museum's collection of more than 20,000 artifacts and documents. The duo will research and draft exhibition text for the Mark Twain House & Museum's upcoming 2023 exhibit on Summering with Twain.
- Andrew Donnelly, Mellon/ACLS public fellow at the National Book Foundation. He is completing a book project entitled Confederate Sympathies: The Civil War, Reunion, and the History of Homosexuality, 1850-1915. He will work on an account of the political humorists during the Reconstruction era, such as Bill Arp, Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, Josh Billings, and Mark Twain.
- William Hunt, assistant professor at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina. He specializes in 19th- and early-20th-century American literature and will investigate the competing parochial and transnational dimensions of Mark Twain's conversion to the cause of women's suffrage.
- Hester Kaplan, author of two story collections, The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction, and Unravished, and the novels The Tell and Kinship Theory. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her current nonfiction project, How Mark Twain Helped Me Find My Father.
- Judith Yaross Lee, distinguished professor emerita of communication studies at Ohio University, where she taught from 1990 to 2019. She is currently completing a study of Clemens's 37-year relationship with the African explorer Henry Morton Stanley.
- Jeanne Campbell Reesman, professor of English and Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her current project is her book, Mark Twain Vs. God: The Story of a Relationship.