The Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) at Rare Book School is pleased to welcome its 2026–28 cohort of Junior Fellows. Many congratulations to all the new Junior Fellows; we look forward to seeing you at RBS!
The new RBS-Mellon SoFCB Junior Fellows are:
Catherine M. Albers-Morris – Assistant Professor, Department of English, Rochester Institute of Technology
- Catherine Albers-Morris is Assistant Professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology where she teaches courses that center digital approaches to literature and narrative. She uses digital tools to study material objects with a particular emphasis on the multilingual cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. Through multispectral imaging, 3D modeling techniques, and virtual platforms, her research reconsiders textual experience through digital interfaces. Her current project examines an early Latin translation of the first two books in Ibn Sina’s The Canon of Medicine, an Arabic medical text as the center of a digital edition.
Savita Ananthan – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania
- Savita Ananthan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie at the intersection of South Indian Islamic print and book culture, multilingualism, and translation studies and decolonial theory. Her dissertation ‘Recovering Polyglossic Spatial Histories: Bukhārī Sufi Ecumenism and Print Culture in Malabar and Coromandel (c.1700 -1900 C.E.)’ uses printed panegyrics or sonic texts to study the history of a lineage of South Indian Sufis, who trace their origins to Bukhara (Central Asia). She is currently a mentee/Career Exploration Fellow with the Zilberman Family Center for Global Collections at Penn Libraries.
Kierra C. Duncan – Ph.D. Candidate, Departments of English and Interdisciplinary Humanities, Princeton University
- Kierra Duncan (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Princeton University. There, she studies and teaches nineteenth and early twentieth century Afro-American and Caribbean literature, archival practices, and material cultures. Her dissertation explores the evolution of a nineteenth century literary genre in the Atlantic world called the plantation journal. As part of this project, she is composing a bibliographic guide to (un)published plantation journals from the Anglophone Caribbean and U.S. South that can used as a resource for students, librarians, and researchers alike.
Cassidy Holahan – Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
- Cassidy Holahan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She researches eighteenth-century British literature at the intersection of book history, digital humanities, media studies, and theater and performance studies. Her in-progress monograph, Theater-Novel Networks, analyzes the influence of the eighteenth-century theatrical mediascape on the rise of the novel and retheorizes literary character as a transmedial phenomenon. Holahan also researches how digitization practices, from large-scale archival databases to bespoke digital editions, transform our understanding of print from the hand-press era.
Robin Scott Jensen – Archivist and Historian, LDS Church History Library
- Robin Scott Jensen is an archivist and historian at the LDS Church History Library. He spent nearly two decades as editor, historian, and archivist for the Joseph Smith Papers project, co-editing six of the 27 volumes. He studies and promotes the archival history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) focusing on record-keeping practices of its members and is working on a project on the early textual culture of Mormonism’s sacred texts. He is the author of Archiving Heaven and Earth: The Historian’s Office and the Making of Mormonism (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press).
Jue Liang** – Assistant Professor and Severance Professor in the History of Religion, Department of Religious Studies, Case Western Reserve University
- Jue Liang is a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from Renmin University of China (2009, 2011), an M.A. from the University of Chicago (2013), and a Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia (2020). Her research and teaching engage with questions about continuities as well as innovations in the gender discourses of Buddhist communities. She is also interested in the theory and practice of translation in general, and translating Tibetan literature in particular. Jue is currently working on a book-length project, entitled “A New Treasury of Dharma: Modern Style Libraries in Tibetan Buddhism.” It is a study of libraries in contemporary Tibetan Buddhist communities worldwide.
James Edward Malin – Associate Librarian, Engineering and Science, The Cooper Union Library, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
- James Edward Malin is Associate Librarian for Engineering and Science at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a food studies scholar. Working across food history, history of science, and information science, his research asks how gastronomic and scientific knowledge have shaped, and been shaped by, the infrastructures that preserve them. James’s work has appeared in the edited volume Practicing Food Studies, the journal Gastronomica, and Eaten: The Food History Magazine. He has also presented for the ASFS, ICREFH, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and recently, the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He serves as Managing Assistant Editor of Food, Culture & Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and is currently working to establish his 167-year-old institution’s first-ever rare book special collection.
Manuel Medrano – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
- Manny Medrano is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at Harvard, where he examines pre-Columbian material texts and the history of their transmission, reception, and study. His dissertation is a five-century global history of Inca writing. Manny is the author of Quipus: Mil años de historia anudada en los Andes y su futuro digital, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Isis, Latin American Antiquity, Ethnohistory, and The Hispanic American Historical Review. He holds an M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard.
Elvin Meng* – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature and Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
- Elvin Meng is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Engaging with the disciplines of intellectual history, media theory, and translation studies, his dissertation studies the conceptual and media histories of language learning within the multilingual Qing empire. He is particularly interested in the history of reading (and its pedagogy), interactions between print and manuscript, and the translingual circulation of texts. In addition to his dissertation, he has researched and cataloged hundreds of rare books and manuscripts in various Asian languages, for both university collections and the antiquarian book trade.
Christy J. Sher – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of the History of Art, The Ohio State University
- Christy Sher is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University. She specializes in Edo-period Japanese print culture, with a research focus on the intersection of sexuality and the history of medicine. Her dissertation examines how visual representations of the human body in early modern Japanese woodblock prints, illustrated books, manuscripts and paintings functioned as sites for the production and circulation of knowledge.
*Recipient of the Jon A. Lindseth Fellowship
** Recipient of the Nancy Norton Tomasko Fellowship