In partnership with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, Tisch Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Tisch Library Graduate Fellowship in the Arts & Humanities, whose thesis and dissertation research projects make creative use of collections, services, and expertise at Tufts libraries.
Kyung Seo Chung - English (PhD)
Kyung Seo’s dissertation will examine London’s living body throughout the long eighteenth century and she will explore texts that are connected to or make significant reference to the city, such as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728). Kyung Seo plans to focus on writing her next chapter on Tobias Smollett’sThe Expedition of Humphry Clinker and rely on 18th century maps and related materials in Tisch Library’s Special Collections, including the Edwin C. Bolles Collection.
Jordan Green - English (PhD)
Jordan’s dissertation explores the ways early English novels experiment with excessive singularity or “obsessive” empiricism as a means of characterization which plays upon the possibilities of accumulating experiences to individuate characters or flatten them into “types.” She will examine how eighteenth-century novels, medical texts, and other popular literature represented the collection of experiences, objects, and knowledge as a kind of “mania” in an industrializing, commercializing nation. Jordan will make use of early printed medical and scientific texts held in Tisch Library’s Special Collection to support this research, including James Granger’s A Biographical History of England in the Edwin C. Bolles Collection.
Kate Haggarty - History of Art and Architecture (MA)
Kate’s thesis explores the Symbolist and psychological ideologies of the late 1800s, using Alfred Maury and Hervey de Saint-Denys’s early conceptualization of the dream state as a framework for understanding Odilon Redon’s lithographic series Dans le rêve. As the psychologists defined the dream as a chimeric blend of memory and imagination, the artist employed this emerging idea to communicate the fragmented, complex experiences and anxieties that permeated fin-de-siécle France, ultimately asserting this period as a moment of intense societal metamorphosis. Kate will draw upon art historical and psychological sources in Tisch Library’s Special Collections, in particular James Sully’s 1880 Sensation and Intuition, Joesph Haven’s 1857 Mental Philosophy, and George Bush’s 1845 The Soul; Or, an Inquiry into Scriptural Psychology.
Artur Vllahiu - Philosophy (MA)
Artur’s thesis examines the relationship between rigorous ordinary mathematical proofs written in natural language and their counterpart proofs written as computer-checkable derivations in formal languages. He will focus on the history of philosophical work as it pertains to the notion of proof as well as exploring contemporary work in the philosophy of mathematics. Artur will engage with materials at Tisch Library and Special Collections focused on early modern philosophical works on logic and proof, including Immanuel Kant’s 1819 Logic from the German of Emmanuel Kant and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Philosophical Essays.
