A pilot project issuing travel grants to far-flung scholars for visiting Northwestern Libraries collections in person was such a success for the 2022-2023 academic year that it has been renewed for the following year — and hopefully well beyond, said Elsa Alvaro, head of Academic Engagement.
Trans World Airlines, Menu: San Francisco to New York. 1977. Courtesy the Transportation Library Menu Collection.
“Most of our peer institutions have a travel grant program like this, so it was a clear gap in our way to engage with the world,” she said. “We are starting small, but we’re eager to see it grow.”
The four travel grants serve the four unique libraries at Northwestern: the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, the Transportation Library, and the Music Library. They build on the model of an existing grant, the John Cage Research Grant, which for 10 years has brought visiting scholars into contact with the Music Library’s archive of the most influential composer of the 20th century.
“The Cage grant has long been considered a success,” Alvaro said. “We’ve discussed for years ways we can replicate that, and in 2021 we found our moment to plan for it and spur a return to in-person research coming out of the pandemic.”
The application period for the 2023-2024 grants is now open, with an April 1 deadline.
The inaugural grant cycle facilitated first-hand contact with some of the Libraries’ rare collections:
- The Cage Grant, the oldest of the travel grants, regularly fosters inventive new exploration of the composer’s materials in the Music Library, said curator Greg MacAyeal. This year’s scholars included a Rutgers PhD student studying the early use of tape recorders in avant-garde music, and a guest researcher from Centre Allemand d’Historie de l’Art, a Parisian art history research group, concerning Cage’s wife Xenia, and the many scrapbooks in the collection. Though the Cage scrapbooks are digitized for easy access to scholars worldwide, the Xenia Cage researcher had an interest in the materiality of the books, MacAyeal said. “The only way she could have fulfilled that research need was in person, so digitization didn’t replace the need for housing the physical materials and having a place to review them,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important that we have a grant for those people for whom the physical materials are still relevant.”
- The Transportation Library selected two award recipients: a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse history professor studying the gendered and racialized aspects of parking policy and enforcement, and a Texas Christian University graduate student studying the transition of historic roads to the modern highway system in the United States. A recent researcher told curator Rachel Cole that he’d have to go to “17 or 18 different libraries” to find all the materials in the Northwestern collection.“Many of the planning studies and reports in our collection are held fairly widely, but not all in the same place,” Cole said. “I’m hoping this grant lets more researchers know that they can find a concentration of important materials here at Northwestern.”
- The Herskovits Library issued three separate travel grants — supported in part by the Program of African Studies, which gladly supplemented the Libraries’ grant efforts to bring scholars from all over the word, said curator Esmeralda Kale. The researchers included University of Cambridge PhD student studying South African history from the late 19th century onward with a focus on the histography of the night; a University of Ghana researcher studying Cold war politics and the Nigerian civil war; and a research fellow from the University of London using the Edward Harlan Duckworth photographs (which document early 20th century Nigeria) to study cultural artifacts taken from and returned to West Africa, “curating memories in the future by looking at its fragmented past,” Kale said.
- The McCormick Library hosted a history PhD candidate from Vanderbilt University studying how universities and academics shaped American policing in the 20th century.
Each grant has a selection committee comprised of librarians and campus partners in the relevant fields. Applicants whose proposals aren’t selected can apply again in subsequent years without prejudice, Alvaro said.