We are excited to share that Michael Haggerty of the Department of History at the University of California, Davis and Lauren Feldman of the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University will join the Richards Center as pre-doctoral fellows for the 2022-2023 year! The center launched the Predoctoral Fellowship Program in response to the unprecedented challenges experienced by graduate students as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Michael Haggerty is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. His scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Bilinksi Educational Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library. His current dissertation project is entitled “Bars to Freedom: Emancipation, Incarceration, and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century America.” His work centers the experiences of incarcerated peoples within the political debates that surrounded slavery and gradual emancipation in New York City during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Lauren Feldman is a Ph.D. student in History at Johns Hopkins University. Her work centers on intersectional histories of intimacy and investigating the broad intellectual question about how norms surrounding relationships in the U.S. have been created and reproduced over time. She is particularly committed to demonstrating how matters surrounding intimacy shed new light on conventional “big-picture” questions of U.S. history and historiography. In this vein, Lauren’s dissertation focuses on the contingent process by which marriage and state became intertwined in the U.S., from the period of the American Revolution to the Civil War. Through an examination of debates over early American marriage laws, she historicizes marriage’s centrality to the formation of United States governance, as well as the implications thereof surrounding the creation and maintenance of a U.S. privatized social structure. As part of this project, she also works on the history of slave marriage in the United States. Lauren’s work has been supported by multiple institutions, including the American Historical Association, the New York Historical Society, and New York State Archives. At Johns Hopkins, she serves as the Project Coordinator for Hard Histories, a public history initiative that examines the histories of racism and discrimination at the university.
During their time in State College, the fellows will make progress on their dissertations and take an active part in both the Richards Center and Penn State’s community of researchers.
