Meet the Women’s History Institute 2023 Summer Research Fellows

To celebrate Women’s History Month, the Selection Committee of the Women’s History Institute has the pleasure of announcing the names of the 2023 Summer Research Fellows. The Summer Research Fellowship supports the research of college and graduate students into the lives of women residing in the Hudson Valley, particularly during the time period represented in the HHV collections: the 18th and 19th centuries. This year’s recipients will be researching women’s letter writing and education.

Cheryl Weaver, Margaretta (Happy) Rockefeller Summer Research Fellowship

“I am excited by the opportunity the Margaretta (Happy) Rockefeller Summer Research Fellowship affords to research and document the postal practices of women in the Hudson Valley region in the early to mid-nineteenth century, a crucial period of postal change and advancement. I look forward to sharing my findings with others dedicated to preserving Hudson Valley History—through an article and presentation—and contributing to work that sustains and preserves important historical artifacts through letter transcription.”

Weaver holds an M.A. in English, an M.Ed. in English Education, and is currently finishing a dissertation toward a Ph.D. in English at the University at Buffalo. In 2022, Weaver received the Emily Dickinson International Society Graduate Fellowship in support of research related to the dissertation “‘You know it is customary’: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Epistolary Practice.” Most recently, Weaver presented on Margaret Fuller’s use of the international post at the 2022 Thoreau Gathering and “Postal Horizons: The British Postal Service in Richardson’s Pamela and Haywood’s Anti-Pamela” at the 2022 Epistolary Research Network Conference.

Grace Ellis, Women’s History Institute Summer Research Fellow
Ellis is a sophomore at Yale University, majoring in American Studies with a concentration in Public Humanities. She has worked as a student archivist for the Beinecke Library’s special collections and is the lead producer of the Yale Daily News history podcast Footnotes. Originally from Rhinebeck, Grace is interested in what the Hudson Valley’s history reveals about the formation of American national identity. Her work at the Women’s History Institute this summer will investigate the relationship between women’s education and Westward expansion between 1800 and 1850. Drawing from school notebooks and correspondences from the Hoffman and Irving family collections, Grace will study women’s experiences as students, teachers, school founders, and mothers. She will evaluate how those experiences informed women’s experiences on the Western frontier, in the Hudson Valley, and in the political dialogue surrounding expansionism.

Both fellows will spend time at HHV over the course of the summer, examining materials in the library and archive with Research Librarian Catalina Hannan.