by Abe Gibson
Susan Hanket Brandt (2011-2012 Research Fellow) successfully defended her dissertation, “Gifted Women and Skilled Practitioners: Gender and Healing Authority in the Delaware Valley, 1740-1830,” and graduated from Temple University in August 2014 with a Ph.D. in History. Her article “‘Getting into a Little Business’: Margaret Hill Morris and Women’s Medical Entrepreneurship during the American Revolution” will be published in a forthcoming special issue of Early American Studies entitled Ligaments: Everyday Connections of Colonial Economies.
The American Philosophical Society has recently made newly processed resources available to researchers, including the following:
- "The World Turned Topsyturvy": Thomas Paine in Print and Ink
- James Van Gundia Neel Papers
- Colonization in the Foulke Papers
- Of Hatches and Haste: A Conservation Adventure
- The Papers of Frank Siebert (1913-1998)
- Read more about these collections here.
The Chemical Heritage Foundation has added a number of new items to its collections. In the fall of 2013 CHF made one of the largest and most important acquisitions in its thirty-year history: a collection of early alchemy manuscripts. Of the nine manuscripts in the collection, seven date to the fifteenth century, some as early as the 1430s. Among them is Petrus Bonus’s Pretiosa margarita novella (The Precious New Pearl), ca. 1450–1480—one of only six known complete copies of that work in existence.
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania recently made the following acquisitions: Dr. Robert Howland Chase papers, 1826-1926 (Collection 3733) Summary An expert in psychology, Massachusetts native Dr. Robert Howland Chase worked at a number of facilities in Pennsylvania, including the State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown and the Friends' Hospital in Frankford, Philadelphia. Description Dr. Robert Howland Chase was a psychologist during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was born in Massachusetts but educated at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr.
Philadelphia has proven an auspicious base for our consortium with its wealth of archival resources and a large community of engaged scholars. With this strong foundation, we have already:
Abraham Gibson (2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellow) has had two book chapters accepted for publication: "Beasts of Burden: Feral Burros and the American West," in The Historical Animal, edited by Susan Nance (Syracuse University Press, 2015), and "Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology" (co-written with Michael Ruse) in A Companion to the History of American Science, edited by Mark Largent (Wiley, 2015).
Benjamin Breen (2011-2012 Research Fellow) is now on a Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship to complete his Ph.D. at UT Austin, and is also a 2014-2016 Mellon-Rare Book School Fellow in Critical Bibliography. Last year he published "No Man Is an Island: Knowledge Networks, Early Modern Globalization, and George Psalmanazar's Formosa," in The Journal of Early Modern History and "'The Elks Are Our Horses': Animals and Domestication in the New French Borderlands" in the Journal of Early American History.
Congratulations to Christopher Willoughby (2014-2015 Research Fellow), who was recently awarded the Waring Historical Library's W. Curtis Worthington Jr. Prize for the best graduate student essay in the history of the health sciences for his paper, "Running Away from Drapetomania: Rethinking Samuel Cartwright." Willoughby is currently on a National Science Foundation Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.
Heidi Hausse (2014-2015 Dissertation Writing Fellow) is working on her dissertation this year as a Fellow at the Consortium. In spring 2014 her article entitled "European Theories and Local Therapies: Mordexi and Galenism in the East Indies, 1500-1700," was published in the Journal of Early Modern History. She recently presented a paper, "To Dismember or Not to Dismember: The Social Process of Amputation in Early Modern Surgery," at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in New Orleans.She continues to co-chair the Early Modern Workshop at Princeton University.
