Fellowship Programs 2018-19

Rachel Banke, Ph.D.

Bute's Empire: Reform, Reaction, and the Roots of Imperial Crisis

Banke recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, where she is currently a postdoctoral teaching fellow. Her work puts late colonial and Revolutionary America into a broader British imperial perspective. Banke's project is supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History & Culture for the Georgian Papers Programme. 

Recipient of the Society of Colonial Wars Fellowship

Mark Boonshoft, Ph.D.

Education and the Fight over Who Should Rule at Home in the Early Republic

Boonshoft is Assistant Professor of History at Norwich University in Northfield, VT. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 2015, and then spent two years as a post-doctoral research fellow at the New York Public Library working on the Early American Manuscripts Project. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic, New York History, and The American Revolution Reborn, and he is currently working on a manuscript, tentatively titled, Monarchical Education and the Making of the American Republic, 1730-1812.

Recipient of the Amanda and Greg Gregory Fellowship  

Kristen Brill, Ph.D.

The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and the Politics of Neutrality in the Civil War Era (1861-74)

Brill is an assistant professor of history at Keele University, UK, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century American history with an emphasis on gender, race, and nationalism. She earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She is the editor of Lucy Wood Butler: Diary and Letters of a Civil War Bride (LSU, 2017) and author of Women in the American Civil War: Lived Experiences in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming 2018).

Justin Cherry

The Impact of George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 18th-Century Foodways

Cherry is the Chef/Owner of Half Crown Bakehouse, a mobile 18th-century clay oven that specializes in colonial foodways. He also works for Husk Restaurant in Charleston, SC. An avid participant in living history of both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, he draws from his deep passion for history. Independent research and onsite archival work has lead him to become exceedingly knowledgeable on colonial foodways and grains of the 18th-century. His work at Mount Vernon will investigate the impact of George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 18th-century foodways.

Sara Collini

Birthing A Nation: Enslaved Women and Midwifery in Early America, 1750-1820

Collini is a Ph.D. candidate in history at George Mason University whose research explores the lives and work of enslaved midwives in the late colonial and early national periods. Her work examines how these women used their medical skills to both support African American families and, paradoxically, strengthen the expanding slave system. Collini received her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and her M.A. in history from George Mason University. 

Iris de Rode

The “soldier-philosopher”, marquis François-Jean de Chastellux (1734-1788) and American Independence

de Rode is a Dutch PhD-candidate in France, at the University of Paris VIII, under supervision of Prof. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke. Her dissertation focuses on François-Jean de Chastellux (1734-1788), a French philosopher and Major General of the French expeditionary forces during the American War of Independence. Chastellux is relevant because of his networks: as a well-known nobleman, he was part of the French court; as a philosophe and academician, he was a valued member of the Republic of letters; and as an officer he was prominent in the French army. This year, she is preparing a biography on Chastellux. The account of his life and the analysis of his ideas serve as a window into the inner workings of the “Ancien Régime” in France, the Atlantic Republic of letters, and the military and intellectual processes of the Franco-American alliance during the War of Independence. 

Recipient of the Chastellux Research Fellowship funded by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation 

George Goodwin, FRHistS, FRSA

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the Propaganda and Intelligence War in the British Isles and Europe During the American Revolution

Goodwin is Author in Residence at the Benjamin Franklin House in London. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father (Yale University Press) and contributor of the Benjamin Franklin entries in the George Washington Digital Encyclopedia. He is the recipient of two separate international research fellowships at the Robert H. Smith Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello. This research project will provide a core element of his forthcoming book, Benjamin Franklin’s War: London, Paris and America’s Fight for Independence. Goodwin is an Eccles Centre Makin Fellow at the British Library, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and of the Royal Society of Arts.  He is a graduate of Cambridge University.

Recipient of the Dr. William M. and Betty H. Busey Family Fellowship

Sean P. Harvey, Ph.D.

Albert Gallatin, the Early Republic, and the Atlantic World

Harvey is associate professor of history at Seton Hall University (NJ). He is the author of Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Harvard University Press, 2015). His article “Must not their languages be savage and barbarous like them’: Philology, Indian Removal, and Race Science,” Journal of the Early Republic (Winter 2010), won the 2011 Ralph D. Gray prize for best article from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He served as co-editor of Reviews for the Journal of the Early Republic from 2014-2017. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment of the Humanities/American Antiquarian Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the College of William & Mary.

Recipient of the James C. Rees Entrepreneurship Fellowship funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation

James F. Hrdlicka, Ph.D.

Federal Empire: Constitution-Making in Revolutionary America

Hrdlicka's research focuses on the origins and development of American democratic constitutionalism.  His book project, a study of Massachusetts from the late colonial period through the ratification of the United States Constitution, explores why Americans embraced constitutional government amidst the warfare and transformation of empire that defined the founding era.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and has been a postdoctoral fellow with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and the Jack Miller Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Elizabeth Jamieson

A Carriage for the President? The Powel Coach and its Place in the Story of George Washington’s Mount Vernon

Jamieson is an independent researcher, lecturer and art-historian with a specialist interest in the material culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the curatorial advisor to the English National Trust on horse-drawn carriages and works across different properties, consulting on collections of wheeled vehicles. She is currently writing a book entitled, The British Carriage, which will be published by Philip Wilson in 2019. Formerly co-director of the Attingham Summer School for the study of the British Country House (2013 – 2017), she is now director of the Attingham Study Programme. 

Joyce Zankel Lindorff, D.M.A.

A Harpsichord as Cultural Narrator: Eleanor Parke Custis and Music-Making at Mount Vernon

Lindorff is Professor of Keyboard Studies in the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University (PA), where she is also an Affiliated Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Her current research focuses on late 18th-century keyboard instruments and home music-making, specifically cultural and expressive aspects of the harpsichord purchased by George Washington for Nelly Custis. Her performances and discussion on this topic were featured in the recent video, “Silent No More: Mount Vernon Makes Harpsichord History” (J.W. Pepper). As a performer, Dr. Lindorff’s CD recordings include music from “The Harpsichord Miscellany,” a volume owned by the Washington family. She earned degrees at Sarah Lawrence College, University of Southern California, and The Juilliard School.

Daniel Livesay, Ph.D.

Endless Bondage: Slavery in Old Age and the Origins of Paternalism

Livesay is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College (CA). His book, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (UNC Press, 2018), chronicles the lives of hundreds of individuals born in the Caribbean to white fathers and free, or enslaved, mothers of color, who eventually left to live with relatives in Britain. His research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Institute of Historical Research in London, among others. Currently, he is completing a manuscript that analyzes life for elderly enslaved Virginians and Jamaicans, exploring how old workers were instrumental to the plantation culture and economy, as well as to broader cultural conceptions of slavery during the era of abolition.

William D. Rieley, P.L.A.

The Guiding Geometry of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Landscape

Rieley is a landscape architect, lecturer, and independent researcher. His firm’s work includes past and ongoing projects at several historic sites including Mount Vernon, Poplar Forest, Carter’s Grove, Brandon, Jamestown, Stratford Hall and Monticello. He taught in the graduate program of the University of Virginia’s Landscape Architecture Department for two decades and continues to present his research at symposiums and conferences nationwide. His research for the National Park Service includes a study that traces the evolution of the gardens at the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site and another that documents the history, construction, maintenance, and use of the carriage road system at Acadia National Park. His current projects include the history of the dovecote in Colonial America and a study of the “residual geometry” of English landscapes that found expression in early American gardens.

Brian Douglas Steele, Ph.D.

“A Man to Whom the Whole World is Offering Incense”: The Founders Remember George Washington

Steele is Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of Alabama at Birmingham. His first book, Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Cambridge, 2012) was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and was named Notable Title in U.S. Intellectual History by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He was named Outstanding Teacher by the graduating class of the University Honors Program in 2014.

Recipient of the James C. Rees Fellowship on the Leadership of George Washington

David O. Stewart

America’s Master Politician

Stewart is a writer of history and historical fiction, following many years as a trial and appellate lawyer. His first book, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, was a Washington Post bestseller and won the Washington Writing Award as Best Book of 2007. American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America, examines Burr’s Western expedition, which landed him on trial for treason, and won the History Prize of the Society of the Cincinnati.  The Washington Post called Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America, a portrait “rich in empathy and understanding” by “an acknowledged master of narrative history.” The book won the William H. Prescott Award of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.

Mark A. Tabbert

'A Deserving Brother': George Washington & Freemasonry

Tabbert is the Director of Collections at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial Association in Alexandria, VA. He the author of American Freemasons: Three Centuries of Building Communities (NYU Press, 2005) and George Washington's Rules for Freemasons in Life and Lodge (Macoy's Publishing, 2017). He is completing the manuscript of his forthcoming book, containing every letter, document, and artifact that attests George Washington's membership in, and relationship with, Freemasonry. A Deserving Brother will be published by the University of Virginia Press.

Karin Wulf, Ph.D.

Founders on Founding: Genealogy and Political Legacies in Washington’s America

Wulf is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world, focused on gender, family, and the state. She is Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and a Professor of History at the College of William & Mary, where she directs graduate student research in early American and gender history. She is a founder and co-chair of William & Mary's Neurodiversity Initiative, supporting neurodiverse students, faculty, and staff and their contributions to the university community, and a co-founder of Women Also Know History, a media and curriculum tool for supporting and advancing the work of women historians. She writes for the Scholarly Kitchen from a humanities perspective on subjects including open access, citation metrics, and the value of specialist writing. 

Hubert Zapf, Ph.D.

George Washington, Frederick the Great, and the Emergence of National Literary Cultures: A Transatlantic Comparison

Zapf is Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg in Germany. He is co-editor of Anglia: Journal of English Philology, Anglia Book Series, Handbooks of English and American Studies (DeGruyter), and the book series Text und Theorie (Königshausen & Neumann). His publications include Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte; American Studies Today: New Research Agendas; Literature and Science; Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology; Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts; Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Interdisciplinary Perspectives; and Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture.