Travel grants connect more scholars with rare materials

Building on the success of the long-standing John Cage Research Grant, a new set of grants is bringing more visiting scholars into personal contact with the Libraries’ rarest collections.

For 10 years the Cage Grant has helped provide non-Northwestern scholars with access to the 20th-century composer’s archive at the University. After a successful pilot program in 2021, a revamped grant program now does the same for several of Northwestern’s unique collections.

“Most of our peer institutions have a travel grant program like this, so it was a clear gap in our way to engage with the world,” said Elsa Alvaro, the Libraries’ head of academic engagement.

The inaugural grant cycle facilitated firsthand contact with several of the Libraries’ rare collections.

This year’s Cage scholars included a Rutgers PhD student researching the early use of tape recorders in avant-garde music and a guest researcher from the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, a Parisian art history research group, who focused on Xenia Cage (the composer’s ex-wife) and the collection’s many scrapbooks. Though the latter are digitized, this researcher was interested in the books’ materiality and thus could only have fulfilled her research needs in person, said Music Library curator Greg MacAyeal.

The Transportation Library selected two award recipients: a University of Wisconsin–La Crosse history professor studying the gendered and racialized aspects of parking policy and enforcement and a Texas Christian University graduate student researching the transition from historic American roads to the modern US highway system.

The Herskovits Library issued three separate travel grants, supplemented by funding from the Program of African Studies. The recipients were a University of Cambridge PhD student researching the last century and a half of South African history, a University of Ghana researcher studying Cold War politics and the Nigerian civil war, and a University of London research fellow studying the Edward Harlan Duckworth photographs (which document early 20th-century Nigeria) to explore cultural artifacts taken from and returned to West Africa.

The Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives grant went to a history PhD candidate from Vanderbilt University studying how universities and academics shaped 20th-century American policing.

Applications for each academic year’s cycle are due in the spring for the following year.