Don Kelly Research Collection Fellowship
The College of Liberal Arts helps sponsor the Don Kelly Research Collection Fellowship, a program that brings scholars each year to utilize resources in the collection that cover history and visual arts of LGBTQ Studies.
Texas A&M University’s College of Liberal Arts co-sponsors with Cushing Memorial Library and Archives the Don Kelly Research Collection Fellowship, a program that brings scholars each year to utilize resources in the collection that cover history, culture, and visual arts of LGBTQ Studies.
“The fellowship is for a period of 2 weeks to 2 months for work that is based on resources in the Don Kelly Research Collection of Gay Literature and Culture housed in the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. Research topics can include, but are not limited to, the following areas, relative to the LGBTQ communities: pulp fiction, literature, film, protest movements, culture, art, popular literature, serials, international, Andy Warhol, Beat Poets, artist books, race, and gender.”
The fellows for 2019 are Sarah Heying, Eric Denby, and Cyle Metzger.
Sarah Heynig
Sarah Heynig is a Ph.D. student in English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi. Her research centers on lesbian print culture, and she is interested in the way the publication contributed to conversations about lesbian aesthetics and practices for producing art communally.
“The Don Kelly Research Fellowship is an incredible opportunity–it afforded me the time and space to read through a huge swath of serials that circulated (or, in some cases, continue to circulate) in national, regional, and local networks,” Heynig said. “I was able to piece together a fuller picture of the way these publications were in direct conversation with each other.”
Eric Denby
Eric Denby is pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, and was interested in the Don Kelly Collection as it is one of the larger collections of press, pulp, and ephemera. His research focuses on how LGBTQ youth have constructed identities and navigated queer spaces in response to oppression, repression, and marginalization, and the acts of resistance that they actively engaged in, both individually and collectively.
“My upcoming dissertation will explore the activism and resistance of LGBTQ high school students during the post-World War II period, with an emphasis on the various ways they were excluded from social, cultural, and political spaces,” Denby said.
Cyle Metzger
Cyle Metzger is currently a Ph.D. candidate in art history with a Ph.D. minor in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Stanford University. He focuses on queer and transgender art and visual histories, and pursued the Don Kelly Collection Fellowship because it is only one of a dozen or so LBGT archives in the country.
“My dissertation project, Deep Cuts: Art and Transgender History in the United States, activates the presence of transgender history in American art in ways that implore resistance to anatomically determined gender categories of male and female in favor of more expansive approaches to gender in both art and contemporary culture,” Metzger said.
Metzger will also be presenting a presentation concluding his time as a fellow, which will discuss the scope of his dissertation, the work he has completed so far, and how he used the Don Kelly Collection for his research. The presentation is scheduled for Tuesday, July 16 at 11:00 a.m. in the Mayo Thomas Room on the first floor of Cushing Library.
To learn more about the Don Kelly Research Collection, click here.