1992–93 Fellow in Aerospace History
Suzanne Kolm is the seventh annual recipient of the Fellowship in Aerospace History, a program supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The fellowship, administered by the AHA in cooperation with the Economic History Association (EHA), the History of Science Society (HSS), and the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), is awarded in an annual competition by a joint committee of representatives from each organization and chaired by Joseph Harahan, Department of Defense On-site Inspection Agency. Other members of the committee are Alfred Hurley, University of North Texas (AHA); Larry Schweikart, University of Dayton (EHA); Karl Hufbauer, University of California, Irvine (HSS); and Joseph Tatarewicz, Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, Rutgers (SHOT).
Ms. Kolm is a doctoral candidate in history at Brown University. She previously earned a B.A. with an interdisciplinary concentration from the Fairhaven College, Western Washington University, and an A.M. from Brown. She has served as a museum interpreter at the Slater Mill Historic Site and worked as a writer and producer of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s slideshow Toward Gender Equity in Exhibitions. In addition to researching and writing her dissertation “The Cultural History of Flight Attendants in the United States, 1930–1978,” she has been a fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and at the Center for the Advancement of College Teaching at Brown. She also served as editor of Teaching at Brown: A Guide for Teaching Assistants and Fellows published in 1990.
During the fellowship term, Ms. Kolm will continue research on her dissertation, a study focusing on questions about culture, gender, and flight and on tensions between flight attendants’ positions as objects and agents in American culture. As Ms. Kolm notes, “Stewardesses were objects, whose meanings were marketed and managed by companies, and they were agents who challenged, changed, or consented to these meanings.” During her fellowship, she hopes to demonstrate “how this cultural tension helped shape the history of commercial air travel from the earliest stewardesses in 1930 to the airline industry’s deregulation in 1978.”
Application deadline for the 1993–94 fellowship is February 15, 1993. The fellowship is for pre- and postdoctoral research in any area of NASA-related history. For information, write the Administrative Assistant, AHA, 400 A Street, S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003.
1992–93 J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship
The recipient of the fifteenth annual J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History is David Sheinin, Trent University. The fellowship is offered annually by the Library of Congress and the AHA to support significant scholarly research in the collections of the Library by young historians. The selection was made by the AHA Committee on the Jameson Fellowship composed of Sara Alpern, Texas A&M University (chair); James M. Banner, James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation; Richard Ellis, SUNY-Buffalo; Paula Fass, University of California, Berkeley; and Joe W. Trotter, Jr., Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Sheinin received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1989 and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. He plans to spend the spring semester of 1993 in residence at the Library researching “The United States and the Early Development of the Pan American Union, 1900–1940.” His project will evaluate the Latin American policy of the United States between 1900 and 1940 in the context of the origins and early development of the Pan American Union. Dr. Sheinin will continue his research in the Library’s collections of early twentieth-century Latin American government publications. Residency at the Library is particularly valuable, since it allows access to collections and papers that have been lost in Southern Hemisphere libraries and thus are not available through interlibrary loan. In many cases, Library of Congress holdings of pre-1940 Latin American government publications are superior to library holdings in the publications’ countries of origin. As an example, Dr. Sheinin states that there “is no complete run … of the Memoria of the Argentine Foreign Relations Ministry in the Ministry’s Library. The Library of Congress has a complete set of this most important Ministry publication.”
The Jameson Fellowship is awarded for one semester or as much of an academic year as the fellow desires to spend in residence at the Library. The project in American history must be one for which the general and special collections of the Library offer unique research support. The application deadline for the 1993–94 competition is March 15, 1993. Further information may be obtained from the Administrative Assistant at AHA headquarters, 400 A Street, S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003.