By Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian, Library Fellowship Coordinator

The NYAM Library has just awarded its 2023 residential research fellowships. The Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Public Health goes to Sean Purcell, Indiana University, for his project “Imaging Consumption: Seeing ‘The White Plague’ in American Medicine”; and the Paul Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine to Anastasiia Zaplatina, Bielefeld University, for her project “The American Soviet Medical Society (1943–1947): Academic Exchanges between Allies and Their Cold War Legacy.” Congratulations to both recipients!

Sean Purcell plans to dig deeply into the Library collections to find visual materials related to early twentieth-century tuberculosis research for an upcoming video art installation. He is especially interested in questions of how and why visual materials such as microscope slides, photographs, illustrations, and specimens were used in medical research, and who the subjects were.

Anastasiia Zaplatina will be looking at archival and published materials related to the American-Soviet Medical Society, and at the Joseph Wortis Soviet Medicine and Psychiatry Papers as part of investigating the impact of this short period of collaboration between individuals in both countries, and specifically whether collaboration ultimately laid the groundwork for increased competition.

We invite all interested researchers regardless of academic affiliation to apply for one of the Library’s research fellowships. Our 2024 fellowship application process will open early in the summer of 2023, with an application deadline at the end of August and a decision in October, for a month’s residence at the Library during the following calendar year. Each fellowship provides $5,000 in support. At the conclusion of their time at the Library, each Fellow gives a presentation and writes a blog post on their work. For background on how these Fellowships arose, see The Faces Behind Our Fellowships; and for more information about the focuses of the awards, including a list of previous awardees and their projects, take a look at the Library Fellowships pages.