This is a guest post by Kluge Center Chair in Technology and Society Ainissa Ramirez. Ramirez is an award-winning scientist and science communicator, who is dedicated to making science engaging and meaningful to the general public. A graduate of Brown University, she received her doctorate in materials science from Stanford University. She began her career as a scientist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and later worked as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Yale. Her most recent book, “The Alchemy of Us” was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and was selected as a top science book by Smithsonian Magazine and Science Friday.

Andrew Breiner: Could you start out by giving an introduction to yourself and your work – especially how you’ve transitioned from working directly in materials science and engineering to being a science communicator and writer?

Ainissa Ramirez: Ever since I was very little, I wanted to become a scientist. Science answered my most pressing questions at the time—like why leaves change color and why grass was green. Learning science brought me joy. Sometime later, I learned that there were people who followed their curiosity all the time and they were called scientists. However, I must admit that was not the only thing that inspired me to become a scientist. What really propelled me was watching a television program on PBS called “3-2-1 Contact.” On this show, there was a repeating segment of kids solving problems. One of the kids was an African American girl. When I spotted her, I saw my reflection.

After high school, I attended Brown University for my undergraduate degree and then Stanford, where I got my doctorate in materials science.  In this field, I really enjoyed learning about the workings of atoms and how we can change how they act to make materials do new things.  But I must admit that I never really saw anyone who looked like myself in my classes. When I graduated, I decided I was going to figure out a way to make science more inviting to everyone.

With my newly-minted doctorate from Stanford in hand, I got a job at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was there where I saw more scientists of color, particularly African American scientists. I finally felt at home.  It was also at Bell Labs where I got a chance to do first-class scientific research, but I also learned how scientists can bring science to the public. At Bell Labs, there was a lecture series for the general public, where breakthroughs were translated for everyone to understand.  When I left Bell Labs to join the faculty at Yale, I created my own version of this program that targeted kids and called it “Science Saturdays,” which featured the 3Ds—doughnuts, demonstrations, and dynamic lectures.

When I hosted “Science Saturdays,” I worked hard to make sure there was a diversity of science topics but also in the demographic of the scientists that were presenting.  I enjoyed putting this program together to get kids excited about science, but I also learned something about myself along the way.

Every April and October when I hosted “Science Saturdays,” I was full of energy, enthusiasm, and excitement.  However, when the program was over, my energy evaporated. After seven years of this cycle, it dawned on me that I enjoyed bringing science to the public more than researching science.  So when my time at Yale was up, I decided not to get another research position, but begin a new career as a “science evangelist.” In this capacity, I wanted to create more moments of wonder and awe by giving science lectures, by making science videos, and by hosting a science podcast.  My mission then was to make more opportunities for people to enjoy, understand, and connect with science.

AB: What kinds of projects did you work on while in the industry, and how does that translate to what you focus on now?

AR: My field of study is material science—the science of stuff. I am interested in how atoms behave and also interested in coaxing them to do new things so that I can create new materials. Some might say I am an “atom whisperer.”

I came to love this field because many of the things I study can be touched, unlike fields like astronomy.  Esoteric concepts became more understandable to me because I could actually see what was happening. When I taught materials science classes, I would incorporate many science demonstrations so that these science concepts would resonate with my students in a new way.  Many of these science demonstrations I obtained while I was sitting in a classroom but some came to me when I was a junior scientist working at Bell Labs.

When I was working at Bell Labs, I learned how to do science differently. I witnessed that my senior colleagues possessed a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the science at work. Watching them in the lab was like witnessing a chef create a beautiful dish. Their knowledge went beyond the textbook and I tried to soak up everything I could while working with them.  It is this deeper way of understanding materials science principals that I tried to pass onto my students and later to my readers.

As for my own research pursuits, I cannot say that what I worked on in the laboratory is what I write about now. But what I can say is that witnessing this high level of science skill in action is what I work hard to translate onto the page in my books.

AB: What inspired you to spread the word about science and technology? And what are the challenges of communicating on topics that can be challenging and intimidating to people who find them unfamiliar? How do you overcome that?

AR: My inspiration comes from my own love for science and also my desire to correct a grave error.  Most people have a bad experience in learning science because it is taught in a way that is dry, boring, or doesn’t really connect with their everyday lives. I am doing my small part to change that.  Science should not be boring and everyone deserves a chance to understand how the things around them operate.  Everyone deserves a shot to be more connected to the world too.  I attempt to create such connections by explaining science in a way that resonates with a broad swath of people.

Admittedly, this work is not easy. Difficult concepts have to be translated into something understandable, which isn’t always straightforward. Usually, scientists explain science using unfamiliar words or by writing an equation. Scientists expect the reader to come to where the scientist is. I take a different approach.  I try to meet the reader where the reader is.

I attempt to make science meaningful and understandable in several ways. When I co-wrote “Newton’s Football,” I explained heady science concepts by comparing them to America’s favorite pastime. In my most recent book, “The Alchemy of Us,” I used storytelling as a way to pull in readers. As a science writer, it is my job to not only translate science but find ways for readers to feel more connected too.

AB: What can you tell me about the research you’re doing at the Kluge Center now, and your eventual plans for it?

AR: During my time at the Kluge Center, I collected lots of articles, book excerpts, and maps for several of my forthcoming science book projects.  Most of my future books will focus on materials science—showing how the stuff around us shaped culture or how the things that surround us reflect our culture. When I am writing about such topics, I often fold in history as well as interesting cultural details, which is why I needed to peruse towers of books from the stacks to find such nuggets.

While at the Kluge Center I also had an opportunity to work with two undergraduates—Frida Garcia Ledezma and Maya Jan Mackey.  They helped me with a second project, which was uncovering the lives of overlooked African American trailblazers. These two rising researchers combed the stacks and dug into the archives to piece together the stories of two individuals—Norbert Rilleux and Henry Baker.

Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) was an inventor from New Orleans, who created a process to make sugar in the 19th century. His method is still employed today for creating food products and pharmaceuticals. Henry Baker (1857-1928) was one of the first chroniclers to compile a list of African American inventors.  He did this work before the age of the internet. His work was particularly challenging, since patents don’t provide demographic information.

I find this work to be important because culturally we don’t have a full sense of all of the people who made contributions to the objects that surround us. Much of our information is unfortunately missing details, which I liken to a portrait that has colors that have been left out.  My intention is to fill in this portrait. I do this work so that people can develop a fuller connection to what is around them and so that reflections can be fostered for others. Ultimately, I want more people to see themselves in the world of science just like “3-2-1 Contact” did for me.

Rena Gabber was a Kluge Center intern, where she worked with PhD candidates Adelaide Mandeville of Harvard University and Dan Baker of Cardiff University, as well as Kluge Center Director Kevin Butterfield. Gabber is a senior at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service in International Politics. She is in Georgetown’s Carroll Fellows program, a highly selective, rigorous academic program that encourages its fellows to think critically and contribute deeply to the world around them. Rena is also the student president of Chabad Georgetown, an organization focusing on creating community among Jewish Georgetown students. 

At the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, I’ve focused my studies on analyzing US foreign policy in the Middle East over the last several decades and politics in the region more broadly. Interning at the John W. Kluge Center was a fantastic complement to my studies at Georgetown: I expanded my understanding of terrorist groups and US defense project funding, while applying skills I’ve developed inside the classroom—like open source research, political analysis and editing—to support research aiming to strengthen democracies today.

My first project at the Kluge Center investigated why people become terrorists. Led by Dan Baker, a PhD candidate at Cardiff University, this project looked at the establishment of the Milice française, a French far-right extremist group that took violent action on behalf of France’s Nazi-backed Vichy government during World War II.

In order to identify the broader motives that underlie joining and participating in terrorist groups, Baker studies the context in which the Milice emerged, the rationale for its creation and how it functioned. Throughout the summer, I considered the leadership of the Milice, investigating how and why former French soldier Joseph Darnard became the effective leader of the group. To do so, I looked through the diary entries of key Vichy bureaucrats from the late 1930s through 1942, in their original French. In piecing together accounts of their interactions with one another, I uncovered how the relationships between Prime Minister Pierre Laval, Darnard, and other likely candidates to lead the Milice precipitated Darnard’s rise to power.

Working with these primary accounts was the first time that I used information from diaries to better understand a historical decision that was made, at least in part, on an interpersonal basis. Ultimately, Darnard’s control over the Milice and the reasons why he received this leadership position help answer broader questions about the role of the Milice as a perpetrator of antisemitic violence.

In addition to my work with Baker, I assisted Kluge Center Director Kevin Butterfield with putting together a special edition of the journal Early American Studies. Working directly under Butterfield, I copyedited the eight articles to be published in the review. I focused primarily on increasing the clarity of the articles and homogenizing the stylistic choices across the articles. I developed a sense of the line that I needed to navigate between thorough and excessive copy editing, while becoming accustomed to the common mistakes I needed to look out for. In addition to copyediting, I collaborated with Butterfield to develop ideas for the review’s introduction. I mapped out common themes across the articles and reviewed existing literature on the subject to see how this special edition of Early American Studies would contribute to and diverge from ongoing academic discussions on the topic.

After finishing my work for Butterfield, I compiled data on federal funding for weather modification projects for Adelaide Mandeville, a Harvard University PhD candidate studying the significance of weather control in the US. The overarching goal of my work for Mandeville was to create charts showing the ebb and flow of financial support for weather control. I hunted for government reports with information on the yearly budgets for different weather control projects, and I used historical legislative research to guide this search. Once I synthesized the funding data into a spreadsheet, I created about a dozen graphs to make sense of it, showing changes in the funding from the federal government or a specific agency or armed service. With a focus on making my spreadsheet and charts as useful as possible, I also wrote a memo summarizing key trends in the data and compiling further research questions tied to key patterns I identified in the dataset.

During my time at the Kluge Center this summer, I enjoyed juggling research on a variety of topics, all sharing an underlying focus on democracy and international relations. It was a wonderfully rigorous nine weeks. I am certain that I will draw upon the research skills and knowledge that I developed at the Kluge Center during my remaining year at Georgetown and after graduation.

This is a guest post by Sofia Zamora Morales. Sofia is a 2024 Kluge Center spring and summer intern, where she worked with Kluge Fellow Andrew Dean and J. Franklin Jameson Fellow in American History Hardeep Dhillon. She is currently pursuing a BS in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Northeastern University as an Honors student. 

Philip Roth’s 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” is among the best-known American works of fiction since World War II. It not only broke records but also scandalized readers with its unapologetically explicit nature. It was listed a ‘prohibited import’ in Australia, while author and actor Jacqueline Susann said on the Tonight Show that she thinks Philip Roth is a fine writer, “but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.”¹

In “Portnoy’s Complaint” its protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, retells the story of his life to a therapist with all the details of sexuality, guilt, neurosis, and family drama. In this continuous monologue, we get a glimpse into a psychoanalytic session, a monologue following his teen years into adulthood where Portnoy’s big problem is that he lives, he says, “in the middle of a Jewish joke.”

The frenetic energy of the novel might lead readers to believe that Roth wrote it in that same fashion; in one breath, like spilling his guts to a therapist. The papers in the Philip Roth archives in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, though, narrate another story, one of a writer who searched over five years for a literary voice that would be all his own.² Sometimes the writing was labored, sometimes it came in a rush, but throughout Roth was committed to finding the right way to structure this unusual story.

Portnoy’s journey can be traced back to 1964. The name Alexander Portnoy and pieces of his story surfaced in abandoned works like “The Last Jew” in 1964 and “The Nice Jewish Boy” or “Masochist Extravaganza” in 1966. There is a note by Roth in the latter folder that suggests its abandoned narrative was later incorporated to a draft of the first chapter of the novel, “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met.”³

It would take almost three years from “The Last Jew” to reach the first recognizable draft of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” which Roth began on January 15th, 1967. Here called “Portrait of the Artist as a Nice Jewish Boy”, the novel is narrated by Robert, a 30-something-year-old Princeton professor married to Sarah Abbott Maulsby. Robert recounts his childhood in Newark, NJ with his parents and the upstairs neighbors in their multi-family house, the Portnoy’s. Jack Portnoy was their youngest child and died in the war when Robert was only 11 years old.⁴ Jack’s legacy stays in Robert’s memory until well into his adulthood.

For all the distance between this first draft of “Portnoy” and the final version, there are still some glimpses of what would become the published work – although in a rather different form. Robert has the same conversation as Alex Portnoy with his sister, when he refuses to change clothes to go the temple for Rosh Hashanah. Later in the draft, Robert remarks about his mother and her lack of embarrassment while changing clothes in front of him, mirroring Portnoy’s dynamic with his mom. These materials and other materials later become “A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis” and background for “The Jewish Blues.”⁴

Sections of what became “Portnoy” were first published in 1967 in several magazines.¹ After “Portrait of the Artist as a Nice Jewish Boy”, Roth drafted “A Jewish Patient Begins his Analysis” (undated in the archives). A later note left by Roth suggests the material was part of “The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Ever Met” – a section of the novel published in Esquire Magazine in April 1967.⁵ In the summer of the same year, “Whacking Off” was published in the high-brow literary journal Partisan Review. This section was not fully developed until later in the year, fall 1967, when Roth wrote a draft called “A Jewish Patient Dreams of his Own Salvation.” Even this draft was still some distance from the novel, however – in this version it has elements of a monologue or play with stage directions.⁶ The last piece before “Whacking Off” takes its final form as the second chapter of the novel, is a draft titled “My Son the Patient”, which, though undated, likely follows from the monologue version of the story, post-fall 1967. The first labeled draft in January 1967 is the predecessor of “The Jewish Blues,” the third chapter of the novel. An undated draft titled “The Rise and Fall of his Testicles” is the first labeled draft of the section. Roth titled its iteration “The Jewish Blues.”⁷ A published version of the section was then showcased in the New American Review, edited by Roth’s friend Ted Solotaroff, in September 1967.

One of the discarded sections in the archives is titled “I’m Pregnant”, in which Alexander Portnoy experiences an episode very similar to one that Roth repeatedly describes in relation to his then estranged wife Margaret Martinson.⁸ This storyline was then developed in “My Life as a Man” (1974) and Roth’s 1988 autobiographical narrative, “The Facts.”

A number of draft chapters did not make it into the published version. Roth discarded sections with titles such as “Oedipus the King”, “Sarah Abbott Maulsby”, “Abie’s Irish Rose”, and “The Shiksa Bag.” Elements of these stories, though, were incorporated into the novel and weaved into the bigger sections – even if the full storylines were abandoned.⁹

The final form of “Portnoy’s Complaint” was still in flux even relatively close to its publication date in January 1969. Roth completed the novel in the period immediately following the sudden death of Martinson in a car crash, on May 10, 1968.¹⁰ A week after her death, having arranged and attended her funeral, he left for Yaddo, a famed writer’s retreat. As Ira Nadel writes in a biography, Roth revised the last two chapters of his draft on the bus ride north. While in the Library of Congress the drafts for these last two chapters are undated, Roth must have completed nearly final versions of them before May 17, 1968.

At Yaddo, Roth finally brought his years-long creative process to its conclusion. Between May 17 and 29, he reworked his various drafts to create what are called in the Library’s archive “nearly final drafts”. On Roth’s last day at Yaddo, his editor at the time, Joe Fox, announced to Random House Publishing that Roth would have his new novel ready within the week. Roth then sent the drafts to Fox on June 2nd, 1968.¹¹ In those 12 days at Yaddo, “Portnoy’s Complaint” took its nearly final form.

After the book came out, ten years on from the controversy associated with “Goodbye, Columbus,” Roth would find himself yet again at the center of public notoriety. Over time, the story of the book’s reception – and the author’s experience of becoming a kind of celebrity – would become part of Roth’s fiction itself. Roth’s most famous character (after Alexander Portnoy, perhaps), is Nathan Zuckerman, a character whose life story mirrors Roth’s. This Zuckerman once published a book by the name of “Carnovsky,” a notorious work of fiction, obsessed with the carnal side of life – which sounds much like “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Over the five years of “Portnoy’s” emergence, we see a creative intelligence both stalled and newly possible. The unique tone of the book – the whining of a young Jewish man caught between his moral integrity and his overwhelming desire – took years to develop. False endings, unfinished chapters, edits from his friends, and extensive research into Freud – as well as brochures on the workings of the City Government of New York – are just some of the pieces of the extensive puzzle. It is the manic and frenetic tone of “Portnoy” that draws in readers with its bawdy jokes, and endless monologue. The story in the archives evidences the many years of effort and fine-tuning that it takes to write a work of this nature. That feeling of effortlessness is what takes the most effort of all.

Footnotes

[1] Nadel, I. B. (2021). Philip Roth: A counterlife of (pp. 203-204). Oxford University Press. & Remnick, D. (2000, May 15). The fierceness of Philip Roth. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/08/into-the-clear

[2] Saul, S. (2021, June 4). Rough: A journey into the drafts of Portnoy’s Complaint. Post45. https://post45.org/2019/04/rough-a-journey-into-the-drafts-of-portnoys-complaint/

[3] Library of Congress, Philip Roth Papers. The Last Jew. Box 129, Folders 4 and 5; Nice Jewish Boy. Box 155 Folder 3

[4] Library of Congress, Philip Roth Papers. Portrait of the Artist as a Nice Jewish Boy. Box 183, Folder 2. For pages with anecdotes in the published version of the novel, see pages 109a and 123 in the manuscript.

[5] Library of Congress, Philip Roth Papers. A Jewish Patient Begins his Analysis. Box 183, Folder 6

[6] Library of Congress, Philip Roth Papers. A Jewish Patient Dreams of his Own Salvation. Box 183, Folder 7

[7] Library of Congress, Philip Roth Papers. The Rise and Fall of his Testicles. Box 183, Folder 8

[8] Library of Congress, Philip Roth Papers. I’m Pregnant. Box 183, Folder 4

[9] Library of Congress, Philip Roth Papers. Discarded sections. Box 183, Folder 5

[10] Nadel, I. B. (2021). Philip Roth: A counterlife (pp.193).Oxford University Press.

[11] Bailey, B. (2021). Philip Roth: The biography (pp. 304). Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.

On May 4, 2024, the John W. Kluge Center hosted the lawyers, researchers, and other staff who, in 1974, considered the question of whether sufficient evidence existed to impeach President Richard Nixon. They gathered to mark the 50^th anniversary of that momentous event.

Many were at the beginning of their careers. They took on the tasks of gathering evidence, assessing constitutional issues, and preparing the case for the 93^rd Congress, resulting in the House Judiciary Committee adopting three articles of impeachment. The presidential impeachment would have been only the second in American history at the time, and the first in 100 years. President Nixon resigned in August 1974, before the impeachment could go forward.

Inquiry staff participated in two panel discussions, available to watch here.

In the first, panelists considered the legacy of the Inquiry.

In the second panel, Inquiry staff discussed what it was like to be a part of this historic work.

On October 3 and 4, 2022, in a conference room on the 6^th floor of the Library of Congress’ Madison Building, a group of scholars from Mexico and the United States poured over the facsimile pictures of the Huexotzinco Codex, which dates back to 1531 and is held in the Library’s Manuscript Division. The scholars had been gathered by Barbara Mundy, the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art at Tulane University, and the 2021-2022 Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress.

The Codex is an important historical artifact, and through its artwork, tells a nuanced story of indigenous resistance to colonial taxation, as well as about religion, agricultural patterns, and local political structures.

The scholars assembled by Mundy included Baltazar Brito Guadarrama, Director of the National Library of Anthropology and History in Mexico City; Lidia E. Gómez García, Professor at the Benemerita Universidad de Puebla; and Georgina Tochimani Tochimani, a local historian (Cronista) from San Pedro Cholula. Othe participants included Mary Elizabeth (Betsy) Haude, a conservator at the Library of Congress and Stephanie Wood, the previous Jay I. Kislak Chair.

During a break from the proceedings, we asked each of these participants to offer some reflections about the historical significance of the Codex, about what the Codex has meant to them personally and to their research, and about what they hope future generations might be able to learn from it. We recorded portions of these conversations, and we are pleased to present them to you here.

Barbara Mundy:

Baltazar Brito Guadarrama:

Georgina Tochimani Tochimani:

Lidia E. Gómez García:

Mary Elizabeth (Betsy) Haude:

Stephanie Wood:

The John W. Kluge Center is pleased to announce the appointment of David Harrington as Kluge Chair in Modern Culture. Harrington is the founder and first violinist of the Kronos Quartet, which since 1973 has produced dozens of albums in a diverse range of styles and commissioned more than 1,000 pieces by composers from all over the world.

The Kronos Quartet released the album “Long Time Passing” in 2020, a celebration of musician and activist Pete Seeger, which involved collaboration with the American Folklife Center. And the quartet’s ongoing Kronos 50 For The Future initiative aims to help young amateur and early-career professional string quartets in developing and honing the skills required for the performance of 21st-century repertoire.

While in residence, Harrington will be working with the collections in the American Folklife Center to uncover stories that may be woven into future Kronos projects.

“As I imagine next steps in the work of the Kronos Quartet,” Harrington said, “my appointment as Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress is the most perfect opportunity for discovery and wide-ranging challenge I have ever received. I am so grateful to everyone involved in creating this honor for me and want Kronos’ future musical adventures to be the true expression of my thanks. I cannot wait to be surrounded by the vast resources and limitless possibilities contained in the Library as I begin to define, with much expert help from the incredible librarians and staff, new adventures for the world of Kronos.”

This is a guest post by Samira Spatzek, a Kluge Fellow and a postdoctoral researcher and academic coordinator at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Free University of Berlin, Germany.

When Princeton socialite and businessman Arthur B. Turnure ventured to publish a New York social gazette at the end of the nineteenth century, he couldn’t have known that this idea would blossom into a renowned fashion magazine that still operates internationally today. With Josephine Redding as its editor (1892-1900), the first issue of American Vogue was published on December 17, 1892. From the beginning, Vogue set out to cater to upper-class readers from New York City’s most distinguished and privileged families as well as to those aspiring to the lifestyle of this elite class.

While both scholars and the general public have shown great interest in Vogue’s overall history, little attention has been paid to the magazine’s first decade. This is unfortunate not least since Vogue, like other women’s magazines and fashion periodicals published at the turn of the twentieth century, both shaped and was shaped by a rapidly changing literary market and publishing landscape. Indeed, it would become “a fertile space for the expression of social and political philosophies,” according to Noliwe Rooks, “teaching women how to envision and navigate constructs of race, gender, nation, citizenship, and identity.”

From its very inception, Vogue was a multimodal publication comprised of a variety of texts including fashion articles for both women and men, fashion spreads and illustrations, sections on etiquette, political commentary, book and theater reviews, music criticism, spreads on the latest interior design trends, and advertisements. Crucially, Vogue would also feature serialized fiction like short stories. Under Redding’s guidance, the pages of Vogue pushed changing ideals of womanhood, projecting what Stacy Sivinski characterizes  as “a playful yet potent interaction between clothing, affective sensation, and depictions of modern femininity that relied upon the kindling of desire to introduce subversive ideas about attaining agency over one’s own body.”

As a literary scholar with a strong interest in North American literature and cultural histories of race and gender, I was curious about the ways Vogue would fashion discursive threads of whiteness and femininity in its inaugural years. Why had scholars not commented more on Vogue’s early years and why is there such little research on the cultural work of race and gender in Vogue at the turn of the twentieth century? These questions would ultimately bring me to the John W. Kluge Center as a postdoctoral research fellow.

In trying to tie together questions of fashion, fiction, race, subjectivity, and gender, I set out to examine the intricate connections between fashion and fictional narrative, and I began to forage the Vogue archive for short fiction by women writers like Kate Chopin. From the preliminary research I had done in preparation for my fellowship, I had learned that Vogue published nineteen of Chopin’s original local-color fiction manuscripts. Today, Chopin is best known to us as the daring author of The Awakening (1899). In general, Chopin’s fictional works show a keen focus on the manifold experiences of women, not shying away from addressing women’s sexual passions in her short stories and novels. Like other woman writers at the time, Chopin would resort to representations of dress and clothing to address, symbolically manipulate, and partake in “fashionable discourses” of gender, class, region, and nation. This would also show in the ways Chopin navigated the nineteenth-century literary market available to her. Based on my research at the Kluge Center, I would suggest that while these categories each are an important optic (a term that I borrow from Christina Sharpe) for engaging with Chopin’s short fiction published in Vogue, they need to be critically supplemented with an analytical perspective cognizant of the discursive and epistemic practices of racialization and the explanatory power of race.

Against this backdrop, I sifted through both the physical and the digital Vogue archives. Eventually, I came across the works of the Boston-based photographer F. Holland Day in Vogue’s October 13, 1898 issue. Given that Redding’s bold editorial choices allowed Vogue to showcase the latest fashions in all kinds of arenas, it did not seem surprising that the magazine would prominently feature some of Day’s photographs, which attracted a good amount of attention at the time. Today, Day’s works, like Chopin’s, are well-known. They are collected and exhibited in prestigious art institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Art Institute of Chicago, and they have been shown internationally. At the Library of Congress, researchers are able to access 676 of his photographs through the “Day photograph collection.”

Initially, I was caught somewhat off guard dealing with visual texts like Day’s photographs in this archive. But as I spent more time with Day’s images in Vogue, I realized that those visual texts can tell us a lot about the ways Vogue and its readers would navigate the interplay of race and gender in its pages. I was privileged to work together with Bela Kellogg, who was a summer intern at the Kluge Center during my 2023 fellowship term. I learned a lot from her expertise in art history and visual analysis. We spent hours looking at illustrations, photographs, advertisements, and other visual materials, and we deeply engaged with the intricate connections between the body, photography, science, and the racializing practices of the archive on a more theoretical level.

The October 13, 1898, issue features a total of eight of Day’s photographs. While there certainly is more than one takeaway from a thorough analysis of each individual photograph and how all of them speak to one another, I’d like to briefly think about the second photograph readers would encounter when browsing through this issue (assuming they start from the title page). The photograph in question is situated on page five. On the next page (verso), we find the editorial. The photograph is situated at the very center of the page, and it is enclosed by a drawn picture frame. The page header simply reads “Vogue” in decorative font. The photograph shows a black man, who is covered by a white cloth, his left shoulder exposed, and he wears a white head band. His head is tilted to the left of the frame (his right), and he gazes somewhat dreamily to the left (again, his right). Unlike some of the other photographs featured in this Vogue issue, the subject portrayed in it does not have a name. As suggested by the caption, the reader/viewer is led to believe that they simply are “A Nubian.”

Scholars of the history and theory of photography have discussed the racialized inscriptions of Day’s so-called African and Nubian photographs in different ways. The photographs can be read to idealize the black male body at a time when lynching was at its height, thus issuing a powerful political statement against the racist sexual discourse fueling such white supremacist murderous acts. However, they can also be said to rehearse racialized notions of the primitive and exoticized otherness in ways that might signify white male homosexuality and desire. As Shawn Michelle Smith suggests, “Day’s fascination with ethnic and racial ‘types’ and his penchant for ‘exotic’ dress might be understood as his attempt to signal codes of sexuality through the associations of race.”

In the case of the photograph featured in Vogue, the most pressing question for me at the time was what happens when it enters into conversation with the other visual texts collected in the same issue and whether it also resonates with others featured in previous issues. At this juncture, it is useful to recall Margaret Beetham’s famous conceptualization of periodicals as being both “open and closed.” To study periodicals is to engage with the specific form of this genre and its relationship to time; it is to study both the promise of newness and the comfort of coherence: “Every number is different,” she writes, “But it is still ‘the same’ periodical. This consistency is necessary so that the reader keeps coming back to buy.”

Immediately preceding Day’s photograph is a whole page filled with various advertisements for such things as women’s hosiery and hats, as well as for dressmakers more generally. At the very center, we find a combined advertisement for “Nubian Fast Black Linings” dress linings and “Nearsilk” undergarments. Both these clothing products promise the customer the highest wearing comfort, and they each feature small drawings of white Victorian women presenting those products next to the ad text. We as readers here already encounter the word “Nubian” that will operate as the caption for Day’s photograph on the next page. In the advertisement, it is combined with “fast black” and “linings.” As such, it comes to signify a product on the late nineteenth-century consumer marketplace. What interests me is that the advertisement simultaneously evokes other advertisements for “Nubian Fast Black Linings” previously featured in Vogue. I am thinking here of two full-page ads published in Vogue volume 6, number 23 (December 5, 1895) and volume 7, number 6 (February 6, 1896), respectively. In their own ways, both ads prominently draw on representations of blackness as racialized/racist stereotypes and exoticized otherness. Those representations are carried into the present of the October 13, 1898, Vogue issue and Day’s “Nubian” photograph, bringing to the photograph their racialized and racializing visual epistemology.

Minh-Ha T. Pham reminds us that “clothing has long been foundational to Western epistemologies of race and the maintenance of dominant social hierarchies.” Working with collections like the Vogue archive at the Library of Congress, then, allows us to pose new questions precisely about such epistemologies and hierarchies. Shedding a critical light on the complex entanglements between various fashion texts allows us to re-examine the histories of fashion and fashion journalism, clothing, race, gender, and the market–leading toward an understanding of how fashion’s cultural work in the past continues to shape present-day futures.

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of Jeremy Greene as Distinguished Visiting Scholar. Greene began his time at the Kluge Center in January 2024.

Greene, MD, PhD, is the William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, Director of the Department of the History of Medicine, co-Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Greene also practices internal medicine at the East Baltimore Medical Center, a community health center affiliated with John Hopkins. In addition to scholarly publications, he is a regular contributor to journals including The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The American Journal of Public Health, and to publications including Slate, Forbes, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

Greene’s research explores how the complex social, cultural, and economic histories of medical technologies influence medical knowledge and clinical practice. His books include “Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), “Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), and “The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth” (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

Greene’s work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Norwegian Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the Greenwall Foundation. His current research project, “Syringe Tides: Disposable Technology and the Making of Medical Waste” is also supported by a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

In 2023, the John W. Kluge Center continued its work bringing scholars, writers, and lawmakers to the Library of Congress for public programming that informs, entertains, and shines a spotlight on the collections of the Library.

With 2023 behind us, we’ve collected some of our favorite events we’ve hosted in the last year, all available to watch now.

Through History to Equality

The Kluge Center worked with 2022 Kluge Prize recipient George Chauncey on a series of three public programs titled “Through History to Equality,” looking at LGBTQ+ life during the 20th and 21st centuries.

In “From Sexual Regulation to Antigay Discrimination,” Library Chief Communications Officer Roswell Encina interviewed Chauncey on the evolution of the ways that governments in the United States have treated LGBTQ+ people.

For “Why Marriage Equality Became a Goal,” Chauncey interviewed civil rights attorney Mary Bonauto on her history working on marriage equality cases.

In “AIDS: A Tragedy and a Turning Point,” Chauncey led a panel discussion on the legacy of the AIDS crisis. In it, Chauncey was joined by Deborah Gould, Duane Cramer, and Jafari Allen to revisit the early history of AIDS and discuss the fear and loss as well as the action and assertiveness that came from that dark time.

Democracy and “Common Sense”: A Conversation with Sophie Rosenfeld

In an interview with Kluge Center Director Kevin Butterfield, Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North Sophie Rosenfeld discussed the ways that knowledge, expertise, and conspiracy theories interact with democratic governance and political equality, sometimes resulting in volatility and uncertainty.

Aynne Kokas on “Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty”

Kluge Fellow Aynne Kokas was interviewed by the Kluge Center’s Andrew Breiner on the ways that data exploitation and privacy issues affect social media, gaming, and other technology services that play major roles in millions of lives, and the ways that China has taken a leading role in controlling data.

Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis

Conversation with Deepak Nayyar

Deepak Nayyar, economist and Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South, was interviewed by the Kluge Center’s Dan Turello on his insights from decades at the highest levels of academia and government, both inside India and internationally.

Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, & Clemency in Early Virginia

Tamika Y. Nunley, social historian and Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History, was interviewed by the Kluge Center’s Andrew Breiner on her book “The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, & Clemency in Early Virginia,” looking at cases in which enslaved women were accused of capital crime, and the ways that clemency for those crimes was used to reinforce the system of chattel slavery.

The Ambiguities of Robert Purvis

Robert Purvis is relatively unknown today, but in his time he was a leading abolitionist and significant post-Civil War figure in the Black community. Staff Fellow and historian AJ Aiseirithe was joined by historian Julie Winch for a discussion of Robert Purvis’ life, and the question of how to research his life when so few of his papers have survived.

The Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs: Illuminating a Graphic Communication System

Stephanie Wood, historian and Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas, discussed the ongoing effort to catalog the Mesoamerican language Nahuatl and its hieroglyphic writing system in a free, online, annotated database.

Transatlantic Conversations: Lawmaking and Representation in the US and the UK

In partnership with the American Trust for the British Library, the Kluge Center convened a panel discussion with US Members of Congress and Members of the UK Parliament to compare their experiences and discuss the workings of democratic governance.

The Last Crusade: Copyright Records, the Emergence of Cinema, and the Stories We Tell

Kluge Fellow Claudy Op den Kamp was interviewed by the Kluge Center’s Andrew Breiner on her discovery of the first motion pictures submitted for Copyright protection in the United States, and the early cinema industry from which it emerged.

Bela Kellogg is a 2023 Kluge summer intern, where she worked with editor Andrew Breiner and scholar in residence Samira Spatzek. She is currently pursuing a B.A. in English and history of art from the University of Michigan. In addition to being a member of the La Jolla Historical Society’s Historic Preservation Committee, Bela is a coxswain for the Michigan Men’s Rowing Team and works for The Michigan Daily as a copy editor and daily arts writer. 

I have a confession: if you asked me three months ago if I’ve ever read a magazine before, I’d probably say no. But it’s not just because the tabloids I’d rifle through in supermarket checkout lines didn’t require much more than light skimming. Rather, my aversion to reading magazines originated from my belief that the words didn’t matter. Spoiler: I was wrong, but in my defense, even when you look beyond the tabloids that only ever gossip about the UK’s royal family, washed up child actors, or JonBenét Ramsey, the literary offerings of magazines in 2023 are still much different than they were 100 years ago.

I started researching historic fashion periodicals as part of my work as an intern at the Kluge Center. There, I assisted the scholar Samira Spatzek in her ongoing investigation into the ways in which fashion literature, namely Vogue, leveraged racialized gender norms in their negotiations of ‘fashionability’ in the 1890s.

It might come as a surprise to learn that at its inception, Vogue was never intended to pander to popular culture the way it does today as celebrities grace the cover from month to month. Instead, Vogue originated from the efforts of New York’s social elite to elevate the concerns of a magazine from purely fashionable to social. As such, Vogue set out to be a “magazine of society [that was] financed, made, planned and read by New York’s leading social group.” But Vogue’s offerings didn’t end at high quality fashion illustrations, portraits of the season’s débutantes, or news of the events at the country club. In fact, Vogue also published literary material, ranging from serialized fiction to editorials about social topics like female employment and co-education. As someone who once thought the words in magazines weren’t important enough to read, I was amazed when Vogue’s literary material quickly became the bread and butter of my research.

The majority of the work I did for Samira entailed keyword searching every issue of Vogue from the first ten years of its publication. In doing so, it didn’t take long for me to notice a glaring disparity in the representation of different racial and ethnic groups in the magazine. On one hand, through portraying New Woman tropes like the unmarried, economically self-sufficient “female bachelor,” Vogue’s literary matter liberated white, upper-class women from the constraints of canonical, domestic femininity. The representation of people of color, on the other hand, told a different story. In essence, people of color were systematically marginalized into aesthetics, caricatures, advertisements, or racially stereotyped literary tropes.

What stood out to me, in particular, was the representation of Japan. When I conducted a keyword search for the term “Japanese,” I immediately noticed that nearly 75% of my search results corresponded to household items, clothing, or other material goods. Through the gaze of New York’s white social elite that Vogue personified, the Japanese were, in other words, more readily perceived as objects than actual people. But even in the rare instances when their representation transcended materiality, Japanese people were still objectified in Vogue’s literary contexts.

Published in the spring of 1893, “Mademoiselle Kiku” by Charlotte Adams epitomizes the way white authors characterized Japanese women as objects in fictional stories. In short, “Mademoiselle Kiku” is a story about the unrequited love that the narrator, a male artist, develops toward a Japanese model whom he meets while visiting a fellow painter named Melton Bowers. Immediately, the narrator is anything but subtle about his sexual attraction to Kiku. His observations of Kiku’s physical appearance are so meticulous, they border on perverse. We’re not even 100 words into the story, and he’s already making careful notes of her “white, mouse-like teeth between her soft red lips, [which] rose a little and made an inclination of her lithe loosely robed body.” And trust me, there’s plenty more where that came from.

But if the narrator’s fixation with Kiku’s physicality isn’t a great enough indication of his degrading gaze, he takes it one step further by literally appraising her body: “Clearly Mlle. Kiku represented a gold mine of pictorial production,” the narrator says, “I already valued her at several thousand dollars. […] Such a golden-skinned, red-lipped, dark-eyed, gracious, charming, intelligent model! I was simply head over heels in love with Mlle. Kiku. Now if I could only get rid of Melton Bowers and keep his model all to myself. There’d be money in her.”

Kiku cannot escape the white male artist’s gaze that exploits her body as though it’s an object that can be bought and sold for profit. The narrator’s treatment of Kiku exemplifies a broader trend among the representations of Japanese people in Vogue. When white authors like Adams wrote stories about Japan, they almost always situated a white European as the narrator. In doing so, Japanese women were consistently characterized as objects, which were animated by nothing but the sexualized fantasies of the Western gaze. To that end, when reading Vogue, it was literally impossible to come across a story involving Japan where a white narrator didn’t ascribe the same list of recycled qualities to Japanese women: “little,” “docile,” “submissive,” “coquettish,” and “pathetic” to name a few.

There was, however, an exception to this rule, one author among the 260 (yes, I counted), whose fiction was published in Vogue during the first ten years of its existence. Murasaki Ayami was the first author of Asian descent to be published in Vogue in its infancy. She may have been the first person of color published in Vogue, and was certainly among the very few in this early era.

Murasaki’s short fiction initially caught my eye in two issues from 1902: first, “The Routing of Madame Shibusawa,” and second, “La Comptesse Grosse, Nee O Haru Fujiwara.” Given my track record, it probably isn’t shocking to learn that a photograph was the reason why “La Comptesse Grosse” stood out to me, long before I read a single word of Murasaki’s, as Samira and I analyzed hundreds of Vogue’s illustrations and photographs to determine the visual modalities of marginalized representation.

Artists overwhelmingly rendered people of color in styles that lacked realism. Representations of Black people, for example, were largely limited to racist caricatures that evoked the visuality of minstrel performances. Representations of East Asian people, on the other hand, recalled a style with a lack of realism aligned more closely with the two-dimensionality of East Asian art like scroll paintings or woodblock prints. In contrast to the modes of Black representation, this racialized style of art didn’t overtly dehumanize East Asian subjects. Rather, this degradation stemmed from the way illustrators appropriated this oriental aesthetic to position East Asian bodies as nothing more than decorative page ornaments framing walls of text.

Be it racist caricatures or the reduction of bodies to decoration, a deprivation of subjectivity was intrinsic to visually representing people of color in Vogue. Even in the rare instances when photography—the most hyper-realistic form of media—featured people of color, Vogue still systematically denied their subjectivity by writing captions that characterized them not by markers of individual identity but rather ethnographic classifiers, such as “Japanese” or “Tahiti.” If you’re interested in learning more about a photograph entitled “A Nubian,” check out Samira’s blog post where she situated it alongside other visual texts she collected from the issue, such as an advertisement for “Nubian Fast Black Linings.”

Like I said before, Murasaki represented the exception to the rule. Occupying almost half of the page space alongside the text of “La Comptesse Grosse” is a black and white photograph of a Japanese woman smiling while entangled in cherry blossoms, accompanied by the caption, “Ucho Laughingly Broke off a Branch of the Exquisite Cherry Blossoms.” In this portrait, Ucho isn’t a racist caricature, a page ornament, nor an ethnographic study. She is a subject. She is human.

This photograph alone was enough to distinguish Murasaki’s work from the other objectifying, dehumanizing representations of Japanese women in Vogue. However, when I read the story itself, I realized Murasaki’s subversive representation didn’t end at the story’s visuals. Instead, Murasaki also mounted a resistance to the literary trope of the “little” Japanese woman, which I had observed all too often in stories like “Mademoiselle Kiku.”

At first, “La Comptesse Grosse” reads like any other story written by a white author about Japan up until that point. The story centers itself around Miss Margot Stuyvesant, a beautiful white American globe-trotter, who travels to Japan to attend a garden party hosted by the empress. This party is regarded as the social event of the year for not only Tokyo’s social elite but also its European diplomatic circle. As Margot’s escort to the party, Count Wilhelm Oscar Grosse, the first secretary of the Austrian Embassy, enlightens her with his degrading view of Japanese women while distantly gazing upon one named Ucho: “You say [Japanese women] are too doll-like, too simple, and that intellect is not theirs. Oh c’est vrai [It’s true]! but it is submission and a slave that gives pleasure to a man, to us men, in a wife!” Murasaki, in this way, aligns Count Wilhelm with the prototypical portrayals of European men, who only fetishized Japanese women because of their thirst for power.

In contrast to stories like “Mademoiselle Kiku,” in this story the power-hungry European man is used to dismantle the trope of the “little” Japanese woman. In the months following the party, Margot receives a letter from a friend who divulges all of the latest gossip from Tokyo. The letter reveals that Count Wilhelm, a “great, fat, stupid Austrian,” went on to marry Ucho, the same “fascinating little Japanese woman” who inspired his degrading comments at the garden party. Instead of conforming to Count Wilhelm’s vision of a submissive, obedient Japanese wife, Ucho is “ambitious,” “insists on having her way,” and is a “clever wee flirt” whom “the men are all in love with.” By contrast, Count Wilhelm is characterized as “frightfully henpecked,” “jealous,” “green with rage,” and a “picture of misery and dejection.”

By depicting the reversal of power between the observer, Count Wilhelm, and the observed, Ucho, Murasaki proves that the objectification of Japanese women begins and ends with the Western gaze. When Count Wilhelm initially gazes at Ucho from a distance, he sees her as nothing more than a pathetic, doll-like slave. After their marriage, however, when his interactions with Ucho go beyond gazing, Count Wilhelm discovers that Ucho obeys no one’s will but her own. And for that reason alone—female subjectivity—Ucho scares him. If you ask me, if Count Wilhelm was really scared of women, he should’ve just said so.

After discovering Murasaki’s work in Vogue, I was eager to find out as much as I could about her life. But a cursory web search turned up no more than four relevant results. Effectively, it was a dead end. I kept looking, and searched every database of historical periodicals that I could think of in hopes of unearthing more of her work.

Finally, I arrived at a series of articles published in The Bystander in 1904 the Russo-Japanese War. In a paragraph preceding these articles, Murasaki is identified as a “Japanese lady, who has just returned to her own country after a stay in England, [and] is acting as the special correspondent of “The Bystander” in Yokohama, sending us, from time to time, accounts of the domestic life during the present conditions—an aspect hitherto quite neglected by the Press.”

What struck me most about Murasaki’s nonfiction was that she doesn’t just subvert traditional modes of Japanese representation—she invents new ones. Writing from a first-person perspective, nonfiction allows Murasaki to depart from the Eurocentric points of view that typically characterized fiction written about Japan. For Murasaki, the act of writing itself, therefore, becomes an articulation of subjectivity for Japanese women, who emerge as agents of strength and resilience through her eyes.

In an article entitled, “The Pinch of War: Stories of Self-Sacrifice in Japanese Homes,” Murasaki paints a picture of how Japanese women grieved the loss of their fallen husbands. Based on their fictional characterizations alone, one might think the loss of a husband would rob “little,” “pathetic” Japanese women of all their strength and spirit. Murasaki shows us that nothing could be further from the truth. In places of worship such as the Ikegami Temple, Japanese women could be seen “prostrating themselves before their gods” just moments before they “raise their hands to their heads to cut off their hair—thus not only signifying they are widows, but registering the vow that they will not marry again.” Shortly after these locks are severed, they are “then bound with a broad band of white paper and hung up at the entrance to the inner chapel, there to remain until a sufficient number of such offerings have been collected to weave into rope, as the rope made from human hair is said to possess an amazing strength and is much valued in the field and on the ships where cords of great durability is required.”

By casting light on this rope of human hair, Murasaki creates a representation of the Japanese female body that is very different from the one envisioned by the Western gaze. Their bodies, in other words, aren’t the objects of a Westerner’s sexual, aesthetic, economic, or power-hungry fantasies. Rather, as reflected by the quality of the rope itself, the bodies of Japanese women act as wellsprings of strength and durability. This is significant because female bodies, Japanese or not, were almost never repurposed for war because they were looked down upon as weak and pathetic. By fighting for the survival of not only their family but their country too, Japanese women, Murasaki included, represented the exception to this rule.

It’s tempting to conclude this blog post with a gross simplification of everything I learned from reading magazines this summer: the words really do matter. And as cliche as it sounds, it’s the truth. For authors like Murasaki, who never made a name for herself outside of the handful of articles published at this time, magazines represented the only way unknown authors could actually reach hundreds of thousands of readers. But there was a catch: while unknown authors could reach large audiences, magazines couldn’t promise that their readers would remember them. After all, there’s a reason why Murasaki rewrote representations of Japanese women, and we all but forgot about them.

Well before magazines lived on the internet forever, they were discarded by the time next month’s issue hit doorsteps. Countless stories remained largely unread in the years, months, or even weeks following their initial publication. As a result, memories of Murasaki and hundreds of other authors alike are endangered in the public consciousness. As more and more magazines are digitized each year, it’s imperative that we treat them like sites of literary excavation, where we can unearth the revolutionary work of authors we’ve long forgotten.

This is a guest post by Sheri Wells-Jensen, Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation at the Kluge Center. Wells-Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. A linguist with research interests in phonetics, braille, language creation, and disability studies, her early work on the potential for non-physically mediated language acquisition (by AI or other non-human beings) led to an ongoing interest in ethical issues related to space exploration, as well as disability issues in space travel. Her current research centers on increasing access for people with disabilities in space. 

In October 2024, a 229-foot-tall Falcon Heavy Rocket will fling NASA’s largest-ever planetary probe into space. At launch, with its belly full of fuel, the Europa Clipper will weigh in at 13,000 pounds. It stands 16 feet tall, and when its solar panels are unfurled, it will be more than 100 feet wide!

This big fellow will zoom through 1.8 billion miles of open space and drop neatly into orbit around Jupiter in April, 2030. From there, it will spend some time adjusting its position and then begin systematic observations of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon.

Europa is a mystery. Its surface is covered with ice — beneath which, we believe, is an immense ocean, and it is that hidden ocean that calls to us.

The Europa Clipper will conduct a series of observations and analyses as it passes by. It will gaze at Europa using visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light, measure its magnetic field, sniff at its chemicals, tap it with radar, and reach out to sense slight changes in its gravity as it spins through space. All of this is designed to answer one simple question: Could this icy little moon support life? Are the conditions right?

This may be a straightforward scientific question, but the Europa Clipper carries more than straightforward scientific instruments.

On one side of the probe, there is a little hatch. It’s an access panel that you could open and stick your arm through in order to adjust key components, should anything need adjusting before launch. Tucked safely away on the inside of that hatch cover is a microchip which will carry the names of millions of people from Earth who chose to sign on. You can see a map of where the names came from and add your own here.

The inside of the hatch cover also bears an engraving of a poem ”In Praise of Mystery,” by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón. In part, it says this: “We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.”

When I attended the Library of Congress event where this poem was read to the public for the first time, Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden asked me why we do this. Why do we send these “extra things”, like poems and lists of names, on scientific missions to space? Such additions complicate the already complex process of getting the probe launched, and they increase the cost. So why do we bother?

At its heart, this mission is more than a set of objective observations and analyses. With the Clipper probe as our hands and our senses, we are doing something profoundly human. This is life reaching for the scent of life. It’s a deeply significant event, and every significant human event begins with a greeting and with an offering of names.

There are around seven thousand languages spoken or signed on Earth today. Each has basic words for concepts and objects like moon, sun, and water, and every language has dozens of words for different kinds of greetings — ways of saying “hello” and “this is why we’re here” and “this is my name.” Dr. Hayden did exactly this when she opened that evening’s event: She greeted the people in attendance, told everyone why we had gathered, and offered them her name. It was necessary.

We send greetings into space because it is our nature. Greetings are nestled deeply into the essence of who we are. We greet out of respect, out of a longing for connection, and out of a need to offer our names and to be known.

The Europa Clipper carries our greetings simply because it is from us. This is humanity, as our poet laureate says, calling out through the dark.

This is a guest post by Bela Kellogg. Kellogg is a 2023 Kluge Center summer intern, where she worked with Writer-Editor Andrew Breiner and Kluge Fellow Samira Spatzek. She is currently pursuing a BA in English and history of art from the University of Michigan. In addition to being a member of the La Jolla Historical Society’s Historic Preservation Committee, Bela is a coxswain for the Michigan Men’s Rowing Team and works for The Michigan Daily as a copy editor and daily arts writer. 

On October 5th, 2000, the Library of Congress’ bicentennial year, John W. Kluge, Metromedia’s former president, philanthropist, and chairman of the Madison Council, gifted the Library $60 million to fund the establishment of the John W. Kluge Center and the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. While the Library had sporadically welcomed scholars and distinguished consultants throughout its history, the Library had not yet established a long-term program of research in residence. With the largest monetary gift in the Library’s 200-year history, Kluge changed that.

Before the Kluge Center came into existence, various departments of the Library occupied the north curtain of the Jefferson Building’s first floor. The Catalog Division, for example, was the first office to occupy this space in 1897. In 1899, the Catalog Division moved out, and the following year, the Maps and Charts division moved in. Philip Lee Phillips, the inaugural chief of the Maps and Charts Division, is the namesake of fellowship that promotes research in geography and cartography. During World War I, Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam headed the American Library Association’s Library War Service, which was temporarily headquartered in the northwest pavilion of the Jefferson Building’s first floor. But apart from this brief occupancy, the maps and charts division remained in the north curtain and northwest pavilion—a space they dubbed the “Hall of Maps and Charts”— until 1953 when the size of its collection outgrew the limited space the Jefferson Building could offer.

The space that was freed up by this move was assigned to the Air Information Division, where they remained until 1961. The same year, the north curtain was renovated for its hodgepodge of new occupants, including parts of the Office of the Secretary, the Near Eastern and North Africa Division of the Law Library, and the Bibliography and International Organization sections of the General Reference and Bibliography Division.

After this point, it’s difficult to trace the occupancy of the first floor’s north curtain because of severe overcrowding problems the Library faced at the time. Under the command of L. Quincy Mumford, Librarian of Congress from 1954 to 1974, the Library not only tripled its personnel from 1,564 to 4,250 employees but also doubled the size of its collections from 33 million to 74 million items. Despite initiating plans for a third building as early as 1957, the Madison Building wouldn’t be completed for another 23 years. In the wake of the Library’s rapid growth during this time, it entered a period of severe overcrowding in its original two buildings.

To temporarily alleviate overcrowding, various divisions of the Library were relocated to an array of rental spaces starting in 1964. By 1970, the Library occupied 13 offsite buildings across DC, Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio, totaling over 500,000 square feet of rental space. With constant relocation efforts made to alleviate overcrowding, it was like a game of musical chairs. To make matters worse, during the 1960s, the Jefferson Building underwent a series of renovations to install new heating, ventilating, and cooling systems throughout the building. The installation of these systems demanded space that the Library could hardly afford to give. An annual report from 1963 asserted that, as a result, the Library had “played a glorified version of the old carnival magician’s trick: under which shell is the pea. Guessing which office door hid which office became a favorite game as divisions moved into temporary quarters partitioned off in exhibit halls and corridors to make room for workers with blowtorches, jackhammers, and crowbars.”

In 1982, the Library retained the architect Arthur Cotton Moore to embark on a campaign to renovate and restore the Jefferson and Adams buildings. In the 1980s, Moore developed a signature style, which he called “Industrial Baroque.” This style underlay Moore’s plans for massive mahogany colonnades that would soon occupy the north and northeast curtains of the Jefferson Building’s first floor. The plans for these colonnades even earned Moore an award from the American Institute of Architecture Design. “Conceived and designed like large pieces of furniture in dark mahogany,” Moore said, “these mini-buildings occupy about half the space in the room and are constructed of hollow members permitting an infinite variety of writing and access for 21st century information delivery systems. Like furniture, they also could be replaced without compromising our carefully restored historic interior shell. The architectural design refers abstractly to both famous precedents in European libraries and to the Baroque design of the building.”

Installed in 1989, these colonnade structures were constructed in an effort to “reactivate the notion of a set of subordinate reading rooms occupying an arch of the grand halls (curtains), providing improved access to a specific branch of knowledge.” The colonnades looked a little different than they do today: Moore stated that when visitors walked into these newly balconied spaces, they would see “1) an open, airy forecourt, where natural light from tall windows illuminates researchers working at new mahogany tables wired for brass lamps and modern laptops; 2) a massive colonnade in the back half of the long room, where division staff work in mahogany paneled offices on two levels; and 3) the handiwork of the Library’s interior design staff, who selected the elegant mahogany furnishings that stand out against the soft colors of the carpet, walls, and ceiling.” After the conception of the Kluge Center, the north curtain’s colonnade was expanded to accommodate the needs of a collaborative research center.

Today, the Kluge Center occupies the first floor of the Jefferson Building’s northern and northeast curtain. Officially opened on July 17, 2002, the Kluge Center consists of a mahogany colonnade with two levels. The lower level is home to 13 offices for distinguished chairs and visiting scholars, while 26 carrels are located on the upper level for postdoctoral fellows.

In 2005, the Kluge Center underwent expansion after reaching an agreement with the British Research Council to offer extended periods of residence to dissertation fellows studying at British universities. To accommodate 24 new fellows participating in the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Gatsby Foundation donated funds to outfit the adjoining northwest curtain with research carrels. Opened on December 1, 2006, the facility is known as the David and Susan Sainsbury Center, and fellows from the Kluge Center occupy the colonnade’s upper level.

At the Kluge Center, scholars are neither segregated by subject matter nor situated in discipline-specific departments, unlike at universities. Instead, the Kluge Center’s design was purposefully created to facilitate encounters and interactions between scholars from different disciplines and career paths, thereby fostering a fluid and lively spirit of inquiry.

This is a guest post by Sheri Wells-Jensen, Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation at the Kluge Center. Wells-Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. A linguist with research interests in phonetics, braille, language creation, and disability studies, her early work on the potential for non-physically mediated language acquisition (by AI or other non-human beings) led to an ongoing interest in ethical issues related to space exploration, as well as disability issues in space travel. Her current research centers on increasing access for people with disabilities in space. 

I read the word “astronette” for the first time in Mary Robinette Kowal’s alternate-history Lady Astronaut series. It’s a brilliant word choice, the feminine/diminutive suffix “-ETTE” deftly conveying the disdain some of the (male) astro-NAUTS in the story displayed toward the women in their midst who were doing the exact same job.

The raw meanness of the word is sharpened by the elegance of the linguistic source material: astro-naut, from the Greek roots meaning “star” and “sailor.” Ah, to be a sailor among the stars, no matter who you are.

I hope we can all agree that “astronette” is a nonstarter, and that nobody in the real world ever needs to use it. Either you are an astronaut, or you are not.

Which brings me (reluctantly) to “parastronaut,” the term recently coined by the European Space Agency (ESA) to refer to the physically disabled astronaut candidates they considered in 2022.

The Parastronaut Feasibility Project is investigating what physically disabled people need in order to go to space. I have nothing but applause for the project goals, and nothing but admiration for their chosen candidate, British physician and athlete John McFall.

But words matter, and just as “astronette” — with “-ETTE” being commonly interpreted as both a feminine suffix and a diminutive one — is an obviously disrespectful and inaccurate title for a person doing the real work of an astronaut — “parastronaut” is not the right word for John McFall, or for those of us who will follow him to the stars.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. The word “parastronaut” seems intended to protect us from the uncomfortable presence of the word “disabled.”

Some people are reluctant to use the word “disabled” because they feel it is somehow insulting or disrespectful, especially when used to refer to someone as clearly accomplished as John McFall. But “disabled” is neither an insult nor a mark against anyone’s abilities. Rather, it describes the fact that we live in a world built for the convenience of people whose bodies and minds conform to the supposed “standard.”

Our environment is loaded with barriers, including stairs to climb, printed signs to read, and audible alarms to pay attention to. This means that those of us who cannot walk, see, or hear have a lot of tiresome extra work to do on a daily basis, in addition to the powerful cultural attitudes proclaiming that we are complicated, fragile, and less capable than everyone else.

The word “disabled” is not a critique of our bodies or our abilities; rather, it is an apt description of the consequence of the disabling barriers placed in our way. “It is a word,” says disability rights activist Rebecca Cokley, “given to us by our elders,” icons of the disability rights movement like Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann, who fought for the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is a word that conveys our cleverness and our strength in the face of adversity. It is our word.

2. I imagine the word “parastronaut” might be intended, in part, to benefit from association with the familiar term “Paralympics.” However, my etymological dictionary tells me that the Greek prefix “PARA-” can mean all these things:

beside, alongside, parallel, almost, accessory, faulty, abnormal

… i.e., “PARA-” has the same ambiguity issues as “-ETTE,” with some of its potential interpretations being less accurate and/or more insulting than others in a given context.

Notably, the Olympics and the Paralympics do run in “parallel”; there are two separate groups of elite athletes who do not directly compete with one another. In space, however, there is no such parallel available. Either John McFall will go to space with the rest of his astronaut cohort or he will not.

Does the “PARA-” prefix, then, indicate that he may work alongside the others, but he is not necessarily expected to succeed? If he does succeed, will he eventually become an un-prefixed astronaut? And when will that day be? When he’s chosen for a mission? When he crosses the Kármán line into space? Or only when he returns safely to Earth, having neither failed in his mission nor overly inconvenienced the rest of the crew?

Or is ESA just using this terminology to manage expectations? The reality is that, right now, largely unnecessary and outdated restrictions prevent all disabled people from going to space, so perhaps the prefix highlights the message that we should keep ourselves in check, not hoping too hard or reaching too high, while a largely non-disabled leadership team eventually figures out if or how we can join the space age.

Of course, not all people who are chosen for the astronaut pool go to space. I would be OK with the word “parastronaut” if it did, in fact, mean something more like “astronaut-in-training.”

But we already have a word for “astronaut-in-training”; those people are called astronaut candidates, and that’s what we should call all our would-be star sailors, whoever they are, including John McFall … and those of us who will come after him.

This is a guest post by Shealyn Fraser. Fraser is a 2023 Kluge summer intern, where she worked with Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History Tamika Y. Nunley on her projects examining Black women’s knowledge of the law and reproductive rights. She graduated with her Bachelor of Arts in American Studies in 2022 and Master of Arts in American Studies in 2023, both from The George Washington University. In addition to her academic work, Shealyn works for two different magazines in the DC area. She is the associate editor of “The Vibe Room,” a Black-owned publication that highlights creatives in the DMV, and has a column titled, “BLOCK POLITICS” for Kolossal Capital Brand Hip-Hop Culture Magazine, which showcases opinion-based pieces on life events that affect the Hip-Hop community. 

This past summer, I interned as a research assistant at the John W. Kluge Center, working under Cornell historian, and Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History Tamika Nunley. If there is anything I have learned during my time at the Library, getting in the door means absolutely nothing if you can’t carve out your own space in an institution that resists change. What you do, the people you seek out, and the knowledge you acquire are things that can only happen on your terms, and they hold the potential to make or break your entire experience.

On the first day of my internship, there were 50 or so people including interns, staff, and scholars gathered for orientation at the Kluge Center. With myself included, five of us in the room were Black. This is a common experience for me and other Black individuals in primarily white spaces. But one of those individuals was Professor Nunley. Before we had properly introduced ourselves, I spotted her across the room and noticed that her hair was down and curly. I also had my hair down and curly. If I am being honest, at that moment, the only thing I could hear in my head was Queen Latifah’s voice singing, “U.N.I.T.Y., love a Black woman from infinity to infinity.”

That day, Nunley’s hair symbolized a lot for me. It felt like I was not alone in the journey I was about to embark on at the Kluge Center. The existence of another Black woman in this space gave me a sense of security and kinship. As described in the article, Fictive Kinship Relations in Black Extended Families, scholars Linda Chatters, Joseph Robert, and Jayakody Rukmalie explain, since the Atlantic slave trade, Black individuals had no choice but to develop bonds with others outside their biological family. As these fictive kin networks developed throughout time, they became increasingly necessary for Black survival. This kinship remains ingrained in all brown-skinned folk today to ensure our mutual well-being. But beyond our kinship, Nunley’s deep brownish-black curls symbolized a freeness of constriction. She has entered the historically white spaces of academia unapologetically herself, and rose to the top of them. As an award-winning social historian, Professor Nunley has more than earned a top spot within her field.

My direction under Nunley was to research legal cases involving enslaved and free Black women from the colonial period to the present, with a specific focus on pregnancy, childbirth, infanticide, abortion, and gynecology. Alongside legal cases, I looked for early studies and archival records about obstetrics and gynecology, as well as for sources about Black women’s healing and botanical practices, medical remedies, and foraging techniques. When I first started researching, I made a progress tracker that provided a list of sources with their titles, relevant page numbers, a summary, and their location in the Library. From this tracker, I moved on to create an annotated bibliography, with each citation having multiple bullet points detailing essential information about each source.

What I have thoroughly enjoyed from doing research at the Library is that you never know what you will find on any given day. Often, my research leads me down rabbit holes of information that I was not looking for but that proved useful nonetheless. For example, while reading Secret Cures for Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, I came across the French words “bois royale” and “bois fer.” With further investigation, I learned that those were the names of plants with medicinal properties, which brought me to French articles about healing. Between 1719 and 1723, some 2,083 enslaved people were imported into the French Louisiana colony. Creole language emerged from this contact: a mixing of the French, Spanish, and African languages spoken there. In this way, French words for specific plants or healing properties entered the lexicons of enslaved people.

The bulk of the sources I discovered within the Library came from the Manuscript Reading Room, the Law Library, and the Science and Business Reading Room. In particular, the Manuscript Reading Room quickly became one of my favorite places in  the Library. There, I found 18 archival sources including slave letters, estates, wills, newspaper articles, slave sale booklets, and more. The wealth of knowledge I have gained during my time here is indescribable. There are many elements of scholarly research that I can now do with ease and confidence because of how much I was exposed to here.

Aside from the research itself, the people I met at the Library and the connections I now have with them changed my life in ways I could have never imagined. Within my first week, I met Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, without yet knowing who she was, and I spent 20 minutes talking her and her senior advisor Nichelle Schoultz’s ear off about my thesis research. I would talk to the president of the United States the same way I would talk to a bus driver since, at the end of the day, we are all human and deserve to be treated as such.

From that encounter, Schoultz took me under her wing and continued to check in with me throughout my time at the Library. She took me to lunch, asked me how I was doing and even introduced me to Maya Cade, the creator and founder of the Black Film Archive and Scholar in Residence at the Library. This was the first time in my life I was surrounded by powerful, successful Black women every day. In one of the oldest, whitest buildings on Capitol Hill, I somehow managed to make my experience incredibly Black, and gain some new aunties!

When the people who look like you are few and far between in any given place, it is easy to get to know all of them. It didn’t take long for me to realize that powerful Black women like Dr. Hayden and Schoultz are not the only ones who keep this place running. In navigating the underground tunnels that connect the Library buildings, I encountered the unsung heroes of the Library—the people tourists rarely ever encounter but who the staff depend on. More often than not, I saw more Black individuals in the tunnels than I did above ground. It is there where people say hello, ask you your name and send you a little “God bless you” as you’re walking by. There, I encountered people like Larry, a Capitol architect, who helped me find my way around the tunnels my first week because I had no clue where I was going. Or there was Meaza, who knows my coffee order like the back of her hand and asked me every Monday without fail what I got up to over the weekend. There was comfort and safety in knowing that no matter what, I was not an invisible Black being in this space. Others saw me, cared for me, and wanted the best for me.

My life today is miles beyond where it was when I started working at the Library of Congress two months ago. I was blessed to gain entry into a space like the Kluge Center, but it was entirely up to me to determine what I made of my time here.  I have acquired knowledge like no other. My hands have touched letters written by enslaved women and men, and receipt booklets holding the prices of Black flesh. But as much as I have learned intellectually, I have learned just as much, if not more, about how to socially navigate historically white spaces. The best advice I can give is to never conform to a system where your color was once counted out. The best way to move your way up is to be authentically and unapologetically yourself. That is what people crave. Laugh when you want to laugh. Show your excitement rather than reserving it. Allow yourself to recognize where you are, how far you have come, and how much you deserve the seat at the table that you’ve created for yourself.

Jacob Berkowitz

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of Jacob Berkowitz as Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation. Berkowitz will begin his time at the Kluge Center this October.

Berkowitz is the author of three science-based books, including “The Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars” (Prometheus Books, 2012), and a recipient of the American Institute of Physics Book Award. His plays have won multiple Prix Rideau awards, including Outstanding New Creation (2022). Berkowitz writes about the intersection of science, story, and ideas of self, particularly from the vantage point of social and technological change. At the Kluge Center, Berkowitz will work on a biography of Paul W. Merrill, the 20th century American astronomer who discovered our stardust origins.

Berkowitz is recipient of the Paris Prix Audace, as science writer on the documentary film “The Quantum Tamers” (2009), and his media appearances include CBC Quirks and Quarks and NPR’s Science Friday. He has been Journalist-in-Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, and a Dibner Fellow in the History of Science (Huntington Library, Pasadena, California). He is the long-time Writer-in-Residence at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa. Berkowitz’s reporting and commentary appears in leading Canadian newspapers, including The Globe and Mail.

Founder of Quantum Writing, a boutique science writing agency, Berkowitz has turned complex facts into engaging stories for dozens of science-based organizations across the United States and Canada, from the (U.S.) National Inventors Hall of Fame to Canada’s futurist agency Policy Horizons. His science writing combines deep expertise in multidisciplinary knowledge synthesis, translation, and popularizing.

Peter Brannen

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of Peter Brannen as Distinguished Visiting Scholar. Brannen will begin his time at the Kluge Center this September.

Brannen is an award-winning science journalist and contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian among other publications. His book, “The Ends of the World,” about the five major mass extinctions in Earth’s history, was published in 2017 by Ecco.

Brannen is an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He was formerly a 2018 Scripps Fellow at CU-Boulder, a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center at Duke University, and a 2011 Ocean Science Journalism Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, MA. His essays have been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and in “The Climate Book” by Greta Thunberg. Brannen is particularly interested in geology, ocean science, deep time, and the carbon cycle.

Mark Leonard

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of Mark Leonard as Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations. Leonard will begin his time at the Kluge Center this November.

Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think tank. His topics of focus include geopolitics and geoeconomics, China, and EU politics and institutions.

Leonard hosts the weekly podcast “Mark Leonards’s World in 30 Minutes” and writes a syndicated column on global affairs for Project Syndicate. Previously, he worked as director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform and as director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think tank he founded at the age of 24 under the patronage of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the 1990s, Leonard worked for the think tank Demos where his Britain™ report was credited with launching Cool Britannia. Mark has spent time in Washington, D.C. as a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and in Beijing as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences.

He was Chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geoeconomics until 2016. He is a regular speaker and prolific writer and commentator on global issues, the future of Europe, China’s internal politics, and the practice of diplomacy and business in a networked world. His essays have appeared in publications such as Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, El Pais, Gazeta Wyborcza, Foreign Policy, the New Statesman, the Daily Telegraph, The Economist, Time, and Newsweek.

As well as writing and commenting frequently in the media on global affairs, Leonard is the author of best-selling books. His first book, “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century,” was published in 2005 by Fourth Estate and translated into 19 languages. Leonard’s second book, “What Does China Think?” was published in 2008 by PublicAffairs and translated into 15 languages. He has also published the edited volume “Connectivity Wars” (European Council on Foreign Relations, 2016). In September 2021, his latest book on this topic “The Age of Unpeace. How Connectivity Causes Conflict” (Random House) was released.

James Miller

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of James Miller as Distinguished Visiting Scholar. Miller will begin his time at the Kluge Center this September.

Miller is the inaugural Professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University (DKU), Chair of the Faculty Assembly, and co-director of the DKU Humanities Research Center. Prior to his appointment at Duke Kunshan, Miller served as the director of the interdisciplinary graduate program in cultural studies and as the director of the School of Religion, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Miller’s research is based in the study of Chinese philosophy, theology, and religion, with an emphasis on philosophy of nature, environmental ethics, and the intersection of religion and ecology in China. He is known worldwide as a scholar of Daoism, China’s indigenous religion, and especially its relation to ecology. He has published seven books including, most notably, “China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future” (Columbia, 2017).

Miller serves as the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Worldviews: Global Cultures, Religion, and Ecology, published by Brill. Miller holds a Ph.D. from Boston University.

Marcy Norton

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of Marcy Norton as Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas. Norton will begin her time at the Kluge Center this September.

Norton is a historian of the Atlantic World after 1492, specializing in the history of science, ecology, and interspecies relationships.  She is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH. Her scholarship explores how on-going encounters between Indigenous and settler communities in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Amazonia transformed the modern world. She is interested in the way that recovering forgotten and suppressed histories can generate pathways to a better future.  Her prize-winning publications include “Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World” (Cornell University Press, 2008) and ground-breaking articles in the American Historical Review and Colonial Latin America Review. Her book, “The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492” is forthcoming this year with Harvard University Press. It details Indigenous and European ways of being with other animals and the consequences—some horrific, others joyful—of their colonial-era entanglement. Her current research investigates how Indigenous ecological concepts changed European natural history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Ainissa Ramirez

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of Ainissa Ramirez as Kluge Chair in Technology and Society. Ramirez will begin her time at the Kluge Center this September.

Ramirez is an award-winning scientist and science communicator, who is passionate about getting the general public excited about science. Ramirez started her career as a scientist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and later worked as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Yale. She authored the books “The Alchemy of Us” (MIT Press, 2020) and “Save Our Science” (TED Conferences, 2013) and co-authored “Newton’s Football” (with Allen St. John, Random House Publishing Group, 2013). She has written for Forbes, Time, The Atlantic, Scientific American, American Scientist, and Science and has explained science headlines on CBS, CNN, NPR, ESPN, and PBS.

Ramirez speaks widely on the topics of science and technology and gave a TED talk on the importance of science education. She has been awarded prizes from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the American Institute of Physics. She speaks internationally on the importance of making science fun and has served as a science advisor to the American Film Institute, WGBH/NOVA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and several science museums. She also hosts a science podcast called “Science Underground.” A graduate of Brown University, she earned her doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford.

This is a guest post by Amanda Escotto. Escotto is a 2023 Kluge Center summer intern where she works with Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance Michael Jones-Correa in his research on social interaction and civic engagement of undocumented immigrants. She is a Master of Public Administration Candidate at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Escotto is the managing editor of “Happy Medium Magazine”, Binghamton’s non-partisan political science magazine. 

The First Day

On the first day that I walked into the Library of Congress for my orientation as an intern for the John W. Kluge Center, I was not sure of what to expect for the next ten weeks of my summer. My fellow interns and I found ourselves surrounded by scholars from all over the world who had gathered at a welcome reception to share the passions and work that led them to be scholars-in-residence at the Kluge Center. It was a unique experience to have access to rich discussions with brilliant minds, where small talk was displaced by rich and engaging conversations. I cherished these throughout my time at the Kluge Center. 

Before I arrived in Washington, DC, I was paired with the scholar I would assist in his research. Michael Jones-Correa is the 2023 Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance. His work centers on immigration politics, ethnic and racial relations, and political behavior. Upon meeting with Jones-Correa for the first time, I learned that I would be assisting him with projects focusing on the impact of state and federal immigration policies on the civic engagement of Latinos. 

I was grateful that Michael Stratmoen, the Kluge Center’s Program Specialist, put great care into pairing interns with scholars according to their mutual research interests. As the daughter of two Latin American immigrant parents, I felt this research was closely connected to my own life experiences and identity. The Kluge Center’s internship program gave me an opportunity to assist with research that suits my interests perfectly, all while preparing me for a potential career in the public sector. 

Immigration and Democracy

On a day-to-day basis, my work involved reading quantitative and qualitative research about the implications of anti-Latino immigration policy for Latino communities. The constant fear of deportation, separation from loved ones, and inadequate job security make the lives of immigrant populations challenging and stressful. This is even the case for immigrants who have obtained work authorization and/or citizenship, as the fear of being unfairly profiled follows them throughout their lives. The research I’ve read dissects how anti-Latino immigration laws perpetuate a culture where Latinos often conceal themselves from the world outside of their trusted communities. This withdrawal from civic life often triggers fear of authority among Latinos. This cautious approach to civic life results in Latino immigrants refraining from reporting crimes, seeking medical attention, or being present for their children at school and community events. 

Anti-Latino immigration policies have severe consequences for democracy due to the high levels of social isolation they engender in immigrant communities. To create conversations about policy reform, it is necessary to continue investigating how anti-Latino immigration policy detrimentally affects civic engagement among Latinos. These conversations bring forth questions about what it means to have membership in a society beyond the technical definitions of being a citizen. 

After receiving training from Library staff on how to conduct research using the Library’s online catalogs, I combed through countless academic journals and developed annotated bibliographies for work that would relate well and add to the main ideas of the project at hand. It was such a pleasure to contribute to Jones-Correa’s process, which not only meant so much to me personally but also evoked important questions about our democracy. 

Scholars, Congress, and the Public

The other side of my internship involved the unique experience of working at events put on by the Kluge Center for Members of Congress, Congressional staff, and the public. Working events was one of the most fulfilling parts of my role as a Kluge intern, as it allowed me to be involved in the interpersonal and intellectual connections the Kluge Center seeks to foster. 

Throughout the year, the Kluge Center hosts events where scholars lead panel discussions, seminars, or lectures about their research and take audience questions on the topic. I helped facilitate a handful of events this summer, including a dinner featuring conversations on US-Russia relations, a conversation with historian and Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History Tamika Nunley about her new book The Demands of Justice, a panel hosted by historian and Kluge Prize recipient George Chauncey about the implications of the AIDS crisis on LBGTQ+ history and more. These events afforded me the opportunity to witness firsthand how the Kluge Center fulfills its mission to promote civic engagement by creating opportunities for those outside of academia to engage with the world’s leading intellectuals. 

One aspect of the job that I did not foresee is the way that I would connect and collaborate with those around me at the Kluge Center. I have made some great relationships with my fellow interns and mentors here at the Library, all of which are so driven and committed to the mission of scholarship and the projection of that scholarship into the world. It has been such a joy to meet like-minded people and get to know them through the course of the summer months. It is hard to believe that my time at the Kluge Center is coming to an end, but I will carry these experiences with me always. I thank all those I met this summer that made the experience so special. 

Tom Cryer is a second-year PhD student at University College’s Institute of the Americas, where his research investigates race, memory, and nationhood through the life, scholarship, and advocacy of the historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). He is an Events Editor at U.S. Studies Online, a Graduate Representative for the Southern Historical Association, and a host on the New Books Network. Bela Kellogg is a 2023 Kluge summer intern, where she worked with editor Andrew Breiner and scholar in residence Samira Spatzek. She is currently pursuing a B.A. in English and history of art from the University of Michigan. 

Bela Kellogg: Before I ask you about your work, I’m curious to know: What brought you to the Kluge Center in the first place? 

Tom Cryer: The British Research Council Fellowship at the Kluge Center is something I’ve been pursuing even before starting my PhD! Writing PhD proposals during the height of COVID-19, when there existed no immediate opportunities to travel, the Kluge Fellowship seemed an ideal—and incredibly rare—opportunity to dedicate months to researching in the Library’s unparalleled manuscript divisions. 

Primary sources are the raw materials of American Studies research, yet, being in the UK, there are several financial, personal and visa-related barriers that prevent prolonged access to them. Having so much in one place alleviates those barriers and provides direct experience of American life—something rarely afforded by valuable yet ultimately limited funding opportunities for UK-based PhDs. After four months in the archives, I’m hoping this experience can fuel my scholarship for the upcoming years, and I’m incredibly grateful for all the folks at the Library for helping me along that journey.

BK: While investigating the emergence of Black historiography in response to post-war racial liberalism, you’ve centered your research on the life and work of the historian John Hope Franklin. What contributions did Franklin make to historical scholarship in the middle of the twentieth century? 

TC: Simply put, extensive. Franklin defined himself as a historian of the South, particularly during the nineteenth century. His public and academic contributions to the historiography on Reconstruction, the period of political realignment in the South following the Civil War, are perhaps most well-known. Works including Reconstruction: After the Civil War (1963) provided a sweeping revisionist approach to one of the most controversial topics in American historiography. During the mid-twentieth-century’s own period of Black liberatory activism, Franklin struggled to dispel racially predicated tropes concerning the alleged corruption and political inability of Black officeholders after emancipation. 

Of course, there’s also Franklin’s landmark From Slavery to Freedom (1947), a survey of Black history in Africa and across the New World, which—although often in complicated and protracted ways—became a curricular centrepiece of the Black History courses that proliferated in the 1960s. Today, Franklin’s remarks stressing the necessity of acknowledging the full scope of Black history are the first words that greet visitors in the historical section of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Yet there are also fields of research where Franklin’s contributions are altogether less recognised. For example, I situate Franklin’s The Militant South (1956) as a notable work in southern intellectual history, a field which Franklin is rarely associated with.

BK: In discussing Franklin’s writing process for From Slavery to Freedom, you talk about the time Franklin spent at the Library of Congress. What kind of challenges did Franklin grapple with as a Black scholar navigating the archive? 

TC: Washington, DC was a segregated city when Franklin came to the Library in 1946. Two years earlier, the lawyer and activist Pauli Murray referred to DC as “the nation’s capital, where Jim Crow rides the American Eagle, if indeed he does not put the poor symbol to flight.” While I’ve found no evidence that Franklin encountered segregation in the Library of Congress itself, the vast majority of restaurants in the local area were segregated. The restaurants within the Supreme Court and the United Methodist Building were the only integrated restaurants surrounding Capitol Hill. On Saturdays then, when both buildings were shut, Franklin would either walk to eat at Union Station or lunch on only a snack bar. Quite famously, the historian of the South C. Vann Woodward noted that had he faced  the kind of challenges Franklin encountered, he may not have become a historian. It’s an important reminder that historians’ experiences are always more than their scholarship—we have to write Franklin’s biography ‘in the open air’, accounting for these daily textures of Jim Crow. 

BK: How does racializing Franklin’s legacy limit one’s understanding of his work as a historian?

TC: A persistent theme of my work is Franklin’s struggle to be recognised beyond his race. We need to historicise the political implications of this desired identificational mobility and respect it. Franklin, after all, always insisted that he taught Southern, not Black or white history, and privately held great reservations about tokenism. From references supporting his PhD funding applications to reviews of his scholarship, Franklin was frequently praised in this insidiously back-handed manner as a scholar who was balanced, objective and Harvard-trained despite being Black. That rhetoric carefully defined the intellectual space from which Franklin was allowed to operate and dismissed the rich tradition of prior Black historiography that inspired Franklin as unsophisticated ‘racial pleading.’ 

Racialising Franklin also had a transparently exculpatory function. Newspapers throughout Chicago and Brooklyn—places where Franklin became a prominent Black hire in historically white history departments—celebrated how Franklin’s appointment supposedly could not have occurred in the Jim Crow South. Symbolising Northern urbane Black mobility, Franklin’s example not only suggested that academic meritocracy worked but also excused a university system that prioritised excellence over equality from the broader racial inequities that plagued these cities. Franklin’s legacy was, therefore, always racialised. Nevertheless, by historicizing those logics we gain powerful insights into how racialisation continues to operate within the academy. I recognise it’s rather easy for some white British guy to say we need to look beyond race. The fact that Franklin was Black mattered and still matters, but we need to ask why it mattered and for whom it mattered. In understanding Franklin’s legacy, we can’t leave such persistent and nebulous characterisations unchallenged or uninterrogated. 

BK: How do the concepts of liminality and double consciousness reframe the discussion of Franklin’s work? And how have these concepts shaped contemporary Black historiography? 

TC: As I’ve written of Franklin’s scholarship during WWII, Franklin’s early scholarship reflected profoundly on liminality—the mid-twentieth-century position of African Americans as formally emancipated yet not guaranteed the rights of first-class citizenship. In Franklin’s early scholarship on the The Free Negro in North Carolina—i.e. antebellum African Americans who were formerly enslaved or had been born ‘free’—he was concerned with problems apparent in his own time: how could marginalised groups be incorporated into the greater American whole? How could they demand equitable rights and avoid economic exploitation? For Franklin, the fact that such questions needed to be asked in the first place was a tragedy caused by the white supremacist assault on Reconstruction, which left emancipation halted and unfulfilled. 

Here’s where second sight comes in. Second sight is a concept arising from W. E. B. Du Bois who, in The Atlantic Monthly in 1897, spoke of “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness– an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Franklin sensed and wrote extensively on his experiences of ‘two-ness’ in works such as 1963’s ‘The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar.’ Franklin, however, also found empowerment from ‘two-ness.’ He continuously celebrated the ability of African Americans to realise the betrayals and paradoxes of American history so as to build a better nation. Faithfully respecting Black history was a test of both a supposedly non-racial American nationhood and this original yet unactualized promise that all men were created equal. This was a vision that, via education and humanistic understanding, sought to translate the defeat of fascism into the elimination of prejudice across the globe. It’s perhaps most telling that all of the editions of From Slavery to Freedom published during Franklin’s lifetime ended with precisely that wish, precisely that contextually specific yet still resonant explanation of why history mattered and continues to matter.

BK: Lastly, what’s next for you? 

TC: Long-term, the perils of the UK academic job market! For now, however, I can’t wait to return to teaching in London and resume all the diverse side pursuits of PhD life, from becoming a Graduate Representative at the Southern Historical Association to hosting book review interviews for the New Books Network. Say what you like about academia, but no two days are ever the same.