2020-21 Robert D.L. Gardiner Writing Fellows
The Gotham Center is pleased to announce the first winners of its new fellowship program, “Writing the History of Greater New York,” established with generous support by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation. The award provides a stipend of $40,000, plus office space and library access for one year at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. The program supports independent and early-career professional scholars with book manuscripts substantially underway, which explore 1) the history of the “outer boroughs” (Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx), 2) Long Island’s contributions to the development of the metropolitan region, or 3) work that integrates these histories somehow, approaching the fields of urban and suburban history with a metropolitan or regional lens.
Bonnie Yochelson is an independent curator and art historian (PhD, New York University), and the author or co-author of several books, examining the life and work of such early modern photographers as Esther Bubley, Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, and Karl Struss, as well as social reformer Jacob Riis. As a Gotham Center / Gardiner Foundation fellow, she will be finishing her current project, "Alice Austen: Conservative Rebel of Staten Island," a study of an amateur photographer and ‘New Woman’ whose work provides an intimate look at Gilded Age New York. Her book will be the first biographical work since Ann Novotny's long-out-of-print 1976 monograph, published shortly after the prolific Victorian artist was rediscovered, and became a feminist and lesbian icon. The book is under review with several presses.
Allison M. McGovern is a working anthropologist (PhD, The Graduate Center, CUNY), and author of the forthcoming book, Challenging Myths and Disrupting Narratives: An Archaeology of Survivance in Eastern Long Island, New York. As a Gotham Center / Gardiner Foundation fellow, she will be completing her new manuscript, "Long Island Dirt: Recovering our Buried Past through Historical Archaeologies," exploring the region's development in relation to the metropolitan core in New York through a series of vignettes that examine how the coastal area provided support for the rise of urban centers along the eastern seaboard. The project also explores how Long Island residents crafted their own identity and culture, including the “forgotten and silenced” past of Native American villages, slave and free black communities, working-class neighborhoods, and planned communities that existed alongside the well-known estates, farms, and suburbs. The book is contracted with SUNY Press, and draws on fifteen years of research and fieldwork.