Library Fellows Announced

The 2007–2008 fellows at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers will include five young novelists, four historians, two Pulitzer Prize winners, and a journalist who won a 2006 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Among the projects the fellows proposed to pursue in their time at the library: The Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Louis Menand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Metaphysical Club," will work on an intellectual history of the Cold War. The art critic Mark Stevens, who won a Pulitzer for "De Kooning: An American Master," written with Annalyn Swan, will begin research for a biography of Francis Bacon. And the photographer Camilo Vergara will create a Web site and a book called a "Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto," based on his photographs of American cities.

The other fellows are the historians Joanne Freeman, James Cook, Joel Kaye, and James Oakes; the novelists Colson Whitehead, Nell Freudenberger, Owen Sheers, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Han Ong; a professor of Irish Studies and Modern Drama at Williams College, James Pethica; the journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who is also a 2006 MacArthur grantee; and the New York correspondent for the London Observer, Gaby Wood. The 15 fellows each receive a $50,000 stipend and, for nine months, an office in the Cullman Center, which is part of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.