SoFCB Junior Fellows Program

SoFCB Junior and Senior Fellows form a thriving community of scholars working  across disciplines to advance the study of texts, images, and artifacts as material objects. They come from a diverse array of institutions and fields, collaborate in a wide range of scholarly and professional contexts, participate in a community of shared research and peer mentorship, and direct the ongoing operations and governance of the Society. Current Junior and Senior Fellows are librarians, archivists, curators, doctoral students, independent scholars, and faculty members who hold tenure-track, teaching, or postdoctoral research positions. They pursue research involving a wide array of objects, including printed books, illuminated manuscripts, coins and medals, carved stones, moveable books, digitized newspapers, and photographic archives. The Society is unanimously committed to generous thinkers and doers who want to build a free, safe, accessible, respectful, and pluralistic community. 

Eligibility

The Society invites applications from early-career scholars and researchers from all fields, with preference given to first-time Rare Book School participants. We welcome applications from tenure track faculty, Ph.D. candidates, curators, librarians, those in postdoctoral research and teaching positions, and independent scholars. We ask that applicants be Ph.D. candidates or possess the terminal degree appropriate to their field (Ph.D., M.L.I.S., &c.). The Society especially encourages applications from individuals from underrepresented backgrounds, individuals from under-resourced institutions, and individuals working on topics currently underrepresented in the fields of book history and bibliography.  

The following individuals may not apply for the Junior Fellows Program: graduate students who are pursuing a Ph.D. but have not yet advanced to candidacy; scholars who received their terminal degrees (Ph.D., M.L.I.S., &c.) ten or more years prior to the fellowship application deadline; students and faculty based at institutions located outside the United States; tenured faculty; tenured scholarly professionals, and professionals hired at equivalent levels; and those who have served on RBS’s full-time, year-round staff. 

Application Process

Applications for the 2026–28 cohort have closed, but check back for more information about when applications for the 2027–29 cohort will open.  

Requirements and Expectations

The Society is a program of Rare Book School and is non-residential: fellows remain based at their home institutions. After successful completion of the Junior Fellows Program, those who elect to become Senior Fellows are eligible for further research, teaching, and professional development opportunities.

Applicants must be available for an orientation on Wednesday 20 May and Thursday 21 May 2026. Applicants must commit to participating in two RBS courses, one per year of the fellowship: the first before 31 May 2027, and the second before 31 May 2028. One course must be on the topic of descriptive, analytical, or textual bibliography (i.e., drawn from RBS’s G-series courses), unless the applicant has previously taken an RBS course that meets these requirements; the other may be freely chosen from any section of the RBS course catalog. Please note that most RBS courses take place in June and July, so it is best to assume that course participation will happen in those months. 

Fellows participate in a variety of activities that bring SoFCB members together and frequently gather at the University of Virginia where RBS is based. The Junior Fellows Program includes: 

Two Rare Book School Courses

Fellows study annually with Rare Book School’s distinguished international faculty during the School’s weeklong seminar-style courses. During their courses, fellows receive hands-on, expert instruction by RBS faculty on interpreting the material forms of textual artifacts. During these courses, fellows have the opportunity to handle, analyze, and interpret materials from RBS’s 100,000-plus item teaching collection. One course on the topic of descriptive, analytical, or textual bibliography will be required; the other course will be chosen by fellows to suit their research interests. Fellows’ tuition for their two RBS courses will be waived. Fellows are eligible for a reimbursement of up to $500 to assist with transportation and lodging costs for attendance to each of their two RBS courses. 

Seminars on Critical Bibliography

Fellows will discuss bibliography and its potential place in humanities teaching and research during their cohort’s orientation at the SoFCB annual meeting. Fellows will receive travel support to attend their cohort’s orientation. 

Symposia on Critical Bibliography

Fellows will each be assigned $500 for use in hosting symposia on topics relating to critical bibliography. These symposia will enable fellows to invite distinguished scholars who are model practitioners of bibliography, book history, and related fields to enrich the ongoing critical conversations at their home institutions. Fellows will be encouraged to collaborate with each other and their local departments, centers, and programs in planning and hosting events. 

Bibliographical Field School

Fellows have the option of attending a two-day “bibliographical field school,” a targeted visit to major special collections, antiquarian bookstores, conservation labs, auction houses, and private collections in New York City. The field school will be tailored to fellows’ research interests and will provide them with opportunities to speak with leading professionals regarding resources pertinent to their research. RBS will cover the cost of housing and group meals for field schools; in addition, fellows are eligible for $400 in support for transportation costs to and from the events.  

Past Recipients

*Recipient of the Jon A. Lindseth Fellowship
** Recipient of the Nancy Norton Tomasko Fellowship

2026–2028 (Cohort 12)

• 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, Department of English and Interdisciplinary Humanities, Princeton University
  • Kierra Duncan (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in English & 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 MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a BA 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 catalogued 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.

2025–2027 (Cohort 11)

• Taylor Hare – Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English, Baylor University
• Julia Hernandez – Curator, Beinecke Library, Yale University
• Jessica Modi – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English and African American Studies, Yale University
• Dotno Pount – Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania
• Celia Rodriguez Tejuca – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, Johns Hopkins University
• Yeidy Rosa – Lecturer, Department of Art History, Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto Rio Piedras
• Hampton Smith – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Lucien Sun – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, University of Chicago
• Huiqiao Yao** – Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Department of East Asian Religions, Trinity University
• Mindi Zhang* – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles

2024–2026 (Cohort 10)

• Alexander Chaparro-Silva – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin
• Helena Chen-Abair** – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, University of Florida
• Emily Coccia – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan
• Christopher J. Foster – Librarian, China Section, Library of Congress
• Kadin Henningsen – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Dylan Lewis – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Maryland
• Graeme R. Reynolds – Instructor, Department of History, University of Chicago
• Oishani Sengupta – Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Texas at El Paso
• Hallie Nell Swanson – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
• Colton Valentine – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, Yale University

2023–2025 (Cohort 09)

• Jiayi Chen – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
• Du Fei – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Cornell University
• Heng Du – Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Chinese, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Wellesley College
• Margaret Geoga – Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania
• Sharmeen Mehri – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Buffalo, State University of New York
• Christina Michelon – Associate Curator, Special Collections, Boston Athenaeum
• Taylor M. Moore – Assistant Professor of History, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Alec Pollak – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Literatures in English, Cornell University
• Neil B. Weijer – Curator of the Harold & Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection, Department of Special and Area Studies Collections, University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries
• Carly Yingst – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, Harvard University

2022–2024 (Cohort 08)

• Cat Lambert – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Classics, Columbia University
• Amanda Licastro – Emerging and Digital Literacy Designer, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, University of Pennsylvania
• Gloria J. Morales Osorio – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Wisconsin­–Madison
• Murad Khan Mumtaz – Assistant Professor of Art History, Art Department, Williams College
• Cindy Nguyen – Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History and Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego
• Trina Parks* – Conservator for Rare and Distinctive Collections, Cornell University Library, Cornell University
• Christopher T. Richards – Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
• Noam Sienna – Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Minnesota
• Yunxiao Xiao – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University
• Xin Yu – Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Washington University in St. Louis

2021–2023 (Cohort 07)

2020–2022 (Cohort 06)

• Crystal Donkor – Assistant Professor of English, Department of English, SUNY New Paltz
• Alison Fraser, Ph.D. – Assistant Curator of the Poetry Collection and Interim Coordinator of the Rare & Special Books Collection, University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
• Amy Gore – Assistant Professor of Early American Literatures, Department of English, North Dakota State University
• Mallory Matsumoto – Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology, Brown University
• Kate Ozment – Assistant Professor of English, Department of English & Modern Languages, Cal Poly Pomona
• Eilin Rafael Pérez** – Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, University of Chicago
• Maria Ryan – Ph.D. candidate, Department of Music, University of Pennsylvania
• Jacinta Saffold – Assistant Professor of English, Department of English & Foreign Languages, University of New Orleans
• Selin Unluonen – Ph.D. candidate, Department of the History of Art, Yale University
• David Weimer – Librarian for Cartographic Collections and Learning, Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library

2019–2021 (Cohort 05)

• Jeremiah Coogan – Ph.D. candidate, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame
• Steffi Dippold – Assistant Professor of Early and Native American Literatures, Department of English, Kansas State University
• Elizabeth Bacon Eager – Assistant Professor of Art History, Department of Art History, Southern Methodist University
• Natilee Harren – Assistant Professor of Art History, School of Art, University of Houston
• Alex Hidalgo – Assistant Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Department of History, Texas Christian University
• Yi Lu – Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, Harvard University
• Clare Mullaney – Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Creative Writing, Hamilton College
• Pranav Prakash – Ph.D. candidate, Department of Religious Studies, University of Iowa
• Megan Eaton Robb – Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
• Rianne Subijanto – Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Baruch College, The City University of New York (CUNY)

2018–2020 (Cohort 04)

• Jennifer Chuong – Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art & Architecture, Harvard University
• Sonia N. Das – Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, New York University
• Brenna Wynn Greer – Knafel Assistant Professor of Social Sciences, Department of History, Wellesley College
• Georgia Henley – Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of English; Center for Spatial & Textual Analysis, Stanford University
• Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa – Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Religious Studies, Occidental College
• Kailani Polzak – C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History, Department of Art History & Studio Art, Williams College
• Ayesha Ramachandran – Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University
• Deborah Schlein – Ph.D. candidate, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
• Joshua Teplitsky – Assistant Professor of History, Department of History, Stony Brook University
• Martin A. Tsang – Cuban Heritage Collection Librarian & Curator of Latin American Collections, University of Miami Libraries, University of Miami

2015–2017 (Cohort 03): under the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography

2014–2016 (Cohort 02): under the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography

2013–2015 (Cohort 01): under the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography