Current and Previous Fritz and Claudine Kundrun Open-Rank Fellowship Recipients

Shakers & the Shawnee Prophet: Making & Breaking Religious Communities on the Jeffersonian Frontier, 1805–1825.

 

Dr. Douglas L. Winiarski is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond where he teaches courses in his areas of expertise including Religion in early America, Native American religions, as well and religion and popular/material culture. His first book, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in the Eighteenth-Century New England (UNC Press, 2017) won the 2018 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 George Washington Book Prize, among many other honors. In addition to Shakers & the Shawnee Prophet, Professor Winiarski has another book, The Memoirs of Josiah Cotton & Allied Documents under contract with the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. 

Eliga Gould (2022-2023) is a professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. His 2012 book, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard University Press) won the Library Journal Best Book of the Year, the SHEAR (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) Book Prize and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. His other works include The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (UNC Press, 2000); Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, co-edited with Peter S. Onuf (Johns Hopkins, 2005). 

 

Professor Gould’s current book project: Crucible of Peace: The Turbulent History of America’s Founding Treaty (Oxford, forthcoming 2023), examines the least studied of the United States’ founding documents: the Treaty of 1783 that ended the American Revolutionary War.

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky (2021-2022) is an expert in the cabinet, presidential history, and U.S. government institutions. Currently she is a public historian and podcaster as well as a columnist for Governing and Washington Monthly. Previously, she was a historian at the White House Historical Association, Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College, Senior Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. She received her B.A. in history and political science from the George Washington University, and completed her masters and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. She is the author of the award-winning The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, which was published by Harvard University Press on April 7, 2020. Her second book, An Honest Man: The Inimitable Presidency of John Adams will be published in 2024 with Oxford University Press. When she’s not writing, researching, or speaking about history, she loves to hike with her husband and her dog, John Quincy Dog Adams.

Michael Blaakman (2020-2021) is an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Yale University (2016) and graduated summa cum laude from the College of William and Mary with an A.B. in History (2009). His work-in-progress, "Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic" is under contract with the Early American Studies Series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Blaakman's nine-month fellowship will begin September 1st, 2020.

Elizabeth Dowling Taylor (2019-2020) is the New York Times bestselling author of A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and over her twenty-two-year career in museum education and research has held the positions of Director of Interpretation at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Director of Education at James Madison's Montpelier. She is now an independent scholar and lecturer and a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville. She is currently working on a biography of Margaret Bayard Smith.

Frank Cogliano (2018-2019) is Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author, most recently, of Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History, 3rd ed (2017) and Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson's Foreign Policy (2014). Professor Cogliano's current project details the complicated relationship between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Marie Frank (2017-2018) is an Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of Massachusetts - Lowell. She holds her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and has taught at the University of Massachusetts for the last fifteen years.

Randi Lewis Flaherty (2016-2017) is a special collections librarian, working in the UVA Law Special Collections to promote and support research in the Library's archival, rare book and digital collections. She received her Ph.D. in history from UVA in 2014 with a focus on the politics and global geography of trade in the early American republic. She has served as a fellow in digital humanities at the UVA Law Library and the UVA Scholars' Lab. She is completing a book, Maritime Frontier: Early American Merchants and the Commercial Republic, 1760-1830.