Residential Faculty Research Fellows

Lindsay DiCuirci
Associate Professor, English, and Affiliate Faculty in Language, Literacy, and Culture
Spring 2025 Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Project: “The Vital Page: Spiritualist Print Culture and Phantasms of Reform in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.”

“The Vital Page” is an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between spiritualism, print culture and
attempts at radical social reform between 1840 and 1870. For a community with no uniform
ideology, no base of operations, and no leadership structure, spiritualists contributed a voluminous
body of print to the nineteenth-century marketplace. Yet, perhaps because of spiritualists’ emphasis
on orality/aurality and an anti-creedal ideology, scholars have not attended comprehensively to the
movement’s history in print. Critics have noted the links between spiritualism and social reform
movements such as abolition, prison reform, and women’s rights, but they have not attended to the
print ties that bind them. DiCuirci is interested in moments of cooperation between spiritualists and
reformist groups, but as my use of “phantasms” conveys, the dream of harmonia was often
disrupted by entrenched biases that even a movement committed to egalitarianism could not shed.

Meredith Oyen
Associate Professor, History, and Affiliate Faculty in Asian Studies and Public Policy
Spring 2025 Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Project: “U.S.-China Relations: A History”

The diplomatic relationship between China and the United States is presently very tense.
Changing leadership in both nations, alongside the pandemic, a trade war, and the perennial issue
of Taiwan have brought us to a new breaking point. Though U.S. politicians leverage fear of
Chinese power to achieve their goals, understanding of the history and conditions that brought us
to this point is limited. This book project offers a new narrative that highlights person-to-person contact
as much as high level diplomacy, centering primary sources to give insight into both countries’
perspectives. The chapters highlight migration and culture alongside more traditional recounting
of political and economic ties. Recognition of the need for such a volume is demonstrated by the
fact that it is currently under contract at Cambridge University Press.