Fellowship recipient Matthew E. Stanley
Each year, the Kentucky Library & Museum awards up to three $500 fellowships to a faculty member or graduate student to encourage scholarly use of our nationally significant collections. One of this year’s recipients is Matthew E. Stanley, a doctoral student in American history at the University of Cincinnati.
A native of White County, Illinois, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Louisville respectively, Matt became interested in our collections as part of his research into regional and sectional identity in southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois during the Civil War era. How did people in the free states of what one historian has termed the “Lower North,” who had political, familial and cultural ties with the South and West, understand their regional and national identities during the war and reframe them afterward? How did people use the Ohio River as a “physical and metaphorical border” to define the meaning of the war? These are some of the questions Matt is exploring through the use of manuscript collections, rare books and newspapers in the Kentucky Library.
Invitations to apply for fellowships are distributed at the first of the year; review of applications begins early in April and recipients are notified in mid-April. For further information, contact Jonathan Jeffrey (jonathan.jeffrey@wku.edu) at the Kentucky Library & Museum. To learn more about our Civil War collections, search TopScholar and KenCat.