Contact: Peter J. Greenhalgh, 508-228-1894, ext. 115; peterg@nha.org
NHA announces 2010 Verney Fellow
NANTUCKET MA: The Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) is pleased to announce that Elizabeth Watts Pope has been awarded the E. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellowship for 2010.
Pope’s chosen topic will be the life and work of Phebe Folger Coleman (1771–1857), a Nantucket diarist, watercolorist, poet, needlework instructor, and creator of the well-known “Nantucket sampler” style. Her accomplished life has not received the same attention as that of her better-known brother, island inventor and genius Walter Folger Jr.
The award of the 2010 Verney Fellowship coincides with Phebe Folger Coleman’s inclusion among the remarkable island women featured in the NHA’s major annual exhibition, Notable Nantucket Women through the Centuries, which will open in the Peter Foulger Gallery on July 1, 2010.
Elizabeth Watts Pope is a scholar who works as the Head of Readers Services at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. Pope has a B.A. in History from Gordon College, Wenham, Mass., and an M.A. in History from the University of Connecticut (UConn); she is currently applying for the doctoral program in history at UConn. Her proposed dissertation topic is the study of nineteenth-century women’s commonplace books and diaries.
Pope has published a paper entitled “Identity Expressed in New England Women’s Commonplace Books” in In Our Words: New England Diaries, 1600 to the Present (Dublin Seminar Series on New England Folklife). She has already closely studied the Phebe Folger Coleman diary held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. She will produce an article and conference presentation based on her research.
Established in 1999, the Verney Fellowship supports research in the collections of the Nantucket Historical Association and other Nantucket repositories and is open to academics, graduate students, authors, and independent scholars. Topics of research for
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recent fellows have included ’Sconset native Charles Frederick Briggs, a nineteenth-
century literary figure in New York City; agrarian history and farm life on Nantucket;
Maria Mitchell; health aboard whaleships; women at sea; scrimshaw; samplers; local artists and prominent citizens; Nantucket’s architectural heritage; Quakerism; and the African-American and Cape Verdean communities on Nantucket.
The E. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellowship provides a modest stipend and housing in one of the NHA’s historic properties, and the fellow is expected to produce an article suitable for publication in the NHA’s publication, Historic Nantucket.
