Fellowships
The American Antiquarian Society offers four broad categories of visiting research fellowships, with tenures ranging from one to twelve months.
All of the fellowships are designed to enable academic and independent scholars and advanced graduate students to spend an uninterrupted block of time doing research in the AAS library. Discussing this work with staff and other readers is a hallmark of an AAS fellowship.
- Long-term Visiting Academic Research Fellowships
Hench application deadline: November 7
AAS-NEH application deadline: January 15
- Short-term Visiting Academic Research Fellowships
Application deadline: January 15
- Short-term Virtual Academic Research Fellowships
Application deadline: May 31
- Fellowships for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers
Application deadline: October 10
Please contact Nan Wolverton at nwolverton@mwa.org or 508-471-2119 with questions.
Meet the Fellows
2022-23 Fellows and Their Projects 2023-24 Fellows and Their Projects Fellows' Directory: All fellows, 1972-present
Artists in the Archive: Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellowships
- Lisa Brooks, Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence
The Society’s 2022–23 Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence is Lisa Brooks, the Henry S. Poler ’59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College. In addition to mentoring junior fellows in residence and helping to foster the fellowship community, Brooks will conduct archival research for her next book, “Tracking Molsemsis: An Environmental History of Eastern Coyotes.” This project will be the first environmental history of eastern coyotes as well as the first book to apply the lens of traditional ecological knowledge to the adaptation of canines. Among her many publications and accomplishments, Brooks is the author of Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize for American History and Diplomacy and five additional awards. Brooks is also the author of the award-winning The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). In all her work, Brooks interweaves Indigenous methodologies, including a focus on language, place, and community engagement, with deep archival investigation. Brooks held a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship in 2001 and was elected to AAS membership in 2012. Deeply engaged in public history and education, she currently serves on the AAS Indigenous Engagement Advisory Committee.
- Emily Gowan, Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow
As the next Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow, Emily Gowen will focus on revising and expanding her dissertation into a book, tentatively titled “On the Margins: Steady-Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America.” Her project reimagines the trans-Atlantic history of the novel by attending to the importance of cheaply printed canonical books. Gowen argues that some of the most lasting “steady-sellers” in literary history— John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605)—owe their fame and endurance to cheap trans-Atlantic abridgments and the marginalized readers whose growing demand kept them steadily in print. Relevant holdings at the AAS include more than 700 chapbooks, pamphlets, and abridgments of the steady-sellers at the core of her project, as well as manuscript collections, printing records, and databases. These materials will allow Gowen to tell the full story of the trans-Atlantic reprinting, abridgment, adaptation, circulation, and reception of early novels in the nineteenth-century United States. Gowen completed her PhD in English and American Literature at Boston University in the spring of 2022. She held an AAS short-term Reese fellowship in the summer of 2019.
Books by Fellows
Since the inception of the AAS fellowship program in 1972, fellows have written over five hundred books based on research conducted at AAS. Below is an illustrated directory of these books. Books may be sorted by author's last name, title, date, subject, and fellowship. Many public programs featuring fellows discussing their books have also been recorded and made available to view online.
Browse by author | Browse by title | Browse by publication date | Browse by subject | Browse by fellowship | Recorded public programs
Scholarship Based on Research at AAS
Fellows' books, articles, and awards are included in the list of recent scholarship based on research at AAS.
Accommodations
Scholars housing at Reese House and the fellows’ residence at 4 Regent Street is available. These residences are spaces for fellows to live, meet, share ideas, and fully immerse themselves in their time at AAS.