Four research fellows are now using the Social Welfare History Archives and Kautz Family YMCA Archives with assistance from the Clarke Chambers Fellowship.

Established in honor of Clarke Chambers, Professor of History and the founder of the Social Welfare History Archives, the fellowships fund travel to the archives for dissertation writers and early career scholars. The first fellowship was awarded in 1992 and, to date, 126 fellows have visited the archives.  

The Clarke Chambers Fellows for 2017

Kelsey Gustin

Ph.D. Candidate, Boston University

“Victorian Values and Social Reform Realism: The Visual Culture of the Progressive Era in New York City, 1890-1920”

Kelsey Gustin is examining representations of the immigrant working class in turn-of-the-century New York by analyzing Progressive Era imagery of “the other half” and exploring how that imagery is encoded with middle-class anxieties about the atrophy of Victorian values in a twentieth-century urban America. Gustin’s research studies the visual culture of four Progressive Era reform movements: fresh air funds, home labor reform, birth control, and playgrounds.

Rebekah McMillan

Ph.D. Candidate, University of Arkansas

“The Healing Hand Laid on a Great Wound: The Elberfeld System and the Transformation of Poverty in Germany, Britain, and the United States.”

Rebekah McMillan is making a comparative study of the impact of the Elberfeld system, a German poverty relief program, on the U.S., Britain and Germany to understand the “…mechanism by which ideas of welfare, and about poverty relief, moved across national borders” and “…the globalizing forces that formed modern welfare systems and shaped changing views of poverty in the West.”  McMillan’s work researches previously unexplored international connections and how they influenced views about the poor as well as the development of poverty assistance programs.

Brianna Lane Nofil

Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University

“Gender, Community Policing, and Crime Control in Late 20th c. America”

Briana Nofil is using a gender studies and carceral studies perspective to examine how the women’s movement identified and challenged sex discrimination within criminal justice institutions, re-framing criminal justice reform as a feminist issue. Nofil’s research focuses on how coalitions of feminist lawyers and activists brought successful civil rights cases impacting women’s interactions with the criminal justice system: from discriminatory practices in hiring female law enforcement officers, to lack of police intervention in domestic violence cases, to the inability of incarcerated women to access job training and work release programs offered to male inmates.

Shuang Wen

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National University of Singapore

“Imperial Mediation: Arab-Chinese Connections at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”

Shuang Wen is researching interactions between laborers from China and from European colonial areas, including Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, on the Western Front during World War II. From 1916 to 1920, more than half a million Chinese and Middle Eastern laborers worked in the construction fields during World War II for the Allied Forces. The existing racial hierarchy not only discriminated against these two groups, but also heightened their sense of differences among themselves. Shuang Wen’s research explores how the Young Men’s Christian Association mitigated the arduous and problematic encounters of these laborers though recreational activities, interpretation services, and social welfare programs.