2:06 p.m., July 16, 2008--Two professors in UD's College of Arts and Sciences have been selected as Library of Congress John W. Kluge Fellows for 2008-09. Marcy J. Dinius, assistant professor of English, received the prestigious honor for her research on the role of the daguerreotype in the literature, rhetoric and visual culture of American abolition from 1833-60; and Monica Dominguez Torres, assistant professor of art history, was honored with the fellowship for her research on the production, regulation and consumption of indigenous heraldry in 16th-century Mexico.

Marcy J. Dinius, Department of English

Dinius, who has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in 19th-century literature and book history at UD since 2006, will conduct research at the Library of Congress from September through April of the upcoming academic year, where she'll collect information for a chapter in her forthcoming book, The Camera and the Pen: America's Romance with the Real in the Daguerreian Age.

“I'm working on a book about early photography,” she said, “and I'm especially interested in daguerreotypes by Augustus Washington. The Library of Congress is the only library that has that collection.”

Dinius said that her research will entail studying the relationship between early photography, particularly daguerreotyping, and American literature. “I'm specifically looking at the invention of photography as a textual phenomenon in America,” she said. “People generally read about daguerreotypes before they saw the images, so I'm looking at the visual/verbal linkage between the two.”

Dinius added that her research will examine how daguerreotypes represented African-Americans in an unbiased way, “as fully human subjects,” and said that she'll look at portraits of the first Liberian government with this angle in mind. “I'm looking at these images in relation to the foundation of a free black state,” she said.

She added that a lot of work has been done on the American Colonization Society, which started Liberia, but not on “looking at the images as a realization of the arguments for African-American subjectivity.”

During her fellowship, Dinius also will look at some of the more obscure writings of Frederick Douglass. “The entire Frederick Douglass archives are at the Library of Congress,” she said, “and these include many manuscripts and holographs that haven't yet been printed.”

Monica Dominguez Torres, Department of Art History

Dominguez Torres joined UD's art history department in September 2003. She teaches undergraduate courses in Latin-American art and Italian and Northern Renaissance art, as well as graduate seminars on the interaction between Europe and the New World. She will conduct research on Spanish heraldry for a chapter in her forthcoming book, Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico, due to be published in 2009 by Ashgate.

She will begin her research in September with a General University Research Program grant that will enable her to spend six weeks in Madrid and Seville, where she will work with archives of the Spanish Crown. Following that, from November to May, Dominguez Torres will pursue her fellowship at the Library of Congress, where she will study documents in the Jay Kislak Collection, as well as materials held in the Hispanic and Portuguese Reading Room.

“Many of these documents are not well-known, so there is a wealth of material out there for scholars to look at,” Dominguez Torres said. She added that a dearth of easily accessible information in her area of interest was a primary factor that inspired her to apply for the fellowship.

“When I began to write the chapter in my book about heraldry, I realized that there wasn't much written about it,” Dominguez Torres said. “There is basic information that hasn't been researched, which is why I want to look at some of the original requests that were exchanged between the nobility of Mexico and the King of Spain to authorize their coat of arms.”

Dominguez Torres will look specifically at how the request for the coat of arms was made, at the original line drawings of the coat of arms, and at the outcome of the negotiation. “I have evidence that the coat of arms that was authorized was not the same as the one that was asked for,” she said.

The John W. Kluge Fellowships are awarded to outstanding humanities professors, researchers and scholars who have received advanced degrees in their respective areas of study within the past seven years. They enable recipients to spend four to 10 months in a collegial residential setting at the John W. Kluge Center in the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress pursuing ongoing research projects. Fellows are selected from an international candidate pool that is narrowed to roughly a dozen honorees each academic year.

Fellows are chosen by the Librarian of Congress based on their scholarly contributions to their field, the appropriateness of their proposed research to Library of Congress collections and the nomination by peers assembled by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson and Duane Perry