New York Public Library / Uris Fellows
The Gotham Center is pleased to announce the recipients of its new research grant program, generously established by the Uris Foundation and the New York Public Library. The program supplies graduate students in the City University of New York (CUNY) with stipends of $1,000 per week, for a minimum of two and maximum of four weeks, to finance research that expands our knowledge of any aspect of New York City history, political, economic, social, or cultural.
The 2020 grantees are:
Jessica Fletcher is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, writing a dissertation entitled, “Accumulative Modernity: Architecture, Gender, and the Welfare State in New York City and London, 1920-1950.” This award will support four weeks of research for that study, examining the transatlantic reform networks formed by women in the late nineteenth century, which transformed the cities into foremost sites of progressive experimentation in public health and radical municipalism in politics. The work focuses on the sites created between the wars to provide modern services to working-class families, principally women and children, often by adapting existing buildings and constructing new ones on existing public spaces in “slum” areas, resulting in the accumulation of many health clinics over the decades.
Maura McGee is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, writing a dissertation entitled, “Globalizing Gentrification: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity on Transforming Streets in New York and Paris.” This award will support four weeks of research for that project, which seeks to fill the gap on the social-scientific understanding of ‘gentrification’ by examining the complex interactions between race, ethnicity and immigration in two neighborhoods at the turn of the last century, Crown Heights in Brooklyn and la Goutte d’Or in Paris. The work examines commercial change in particular, and aims to show how differences between Brooklyn and Paris, and more generally, between the United States and France, shape the ways in which race, class, and nativity interact in constituting commercial streets. It argues that contestations over the nature of neighborhood shopping streets reveal tensions between groups over a fundamental right to the city.
Deena Ecker is a Ph.D. student in History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. This award will support four weeks of research for a pre-dissertation study exploring the lived experience of sex workers in early twentieth century New York City, a neglected aspect of the historical literature on prostitution, which often focuses on reform and reaction. The project will seek to answer why so many women chose this form of labor against others in the Progressive Era, what economic or social freedoms it might have afforded, the variety and level of control exerted by pimps, and the extent to which the illegal business created “a new kind of American culture,” with greater social and cultural mixing than found even in traditional brothels.
Lauren Rosenblum is a Ph.D. student in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. This award will support four weeks of research for a pre-dissertation study entitled, “The Evolution of Manual and Mechanical Craftsmanship: Uniting Artistic and Industrial Histories of American Lithography, 1930-70.” The research will periodize the growing creative interest in the medium during the mid-twentieth century and its diminishing commercial application over time, highlighting the artists, printers, and print-shops operating within New York City; the first study to consider the development of modern, artistic lithography alongside its commercial equivalent.
