Platzman Memorial Fellowships

The Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowships, established by bequest of George W. Platzman (1920-2008), Professor Emeritus in Geophysical Sciences at the University, are named in memory of George’s brother Robert Platzman (1918-1973), who was Professor of Chemistry and Physics and worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in the 1940s.

The program provides up to $3,500 for visiting researchers working on projects that require on-site consultation of University of Chicago Library collections, primarily archives, manuscripts or printed materials in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. The funds can be used for travel, living and research expenses. Support for beginning scholars is a priority of the program, as are projects that cannot be conducted without onsite access to the original materials and where University of Chicago collections are central to the research. Special consideration will be given to applications in the fields of late 19th or early 20th-century physics or physical chemistry, or 19th-century classical opera.

The announcement of availability of each year's Platzman Fellowships is made in November, with a deadline for submission in February. Platzman Fellowship funds may be used for visits to the University of Chicago Library during June-September of the award year.

Applications are now being accepted for the 2025 Fellowship.

Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowships have been awarded to almost 200 visiting scholars since the program began in 2006. For further information on fellows and projects from previous years, please consult the listing of Platzman Memorial Fellowship recipients, 2006-2023.

2024 Platzman Fellowship Recipients

The University of Chicago Library is pleased to announce the recipients of Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowships for 2024. A list of the 2024 Fellows appears below along with their academic affiliations and research topics.

David Chen

Independent Scholar, Morristown, New Jersey

Dr. Franklin C. McLean’s international decade, 1913-1923

Mariano Dagatti

Professor, University of Entre Rios, Paraná

Understandings and misunderstandings: the correspondence between Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth

Adhitya Dhanapal

Doctoral Candidate, Princeton University

Caste and capitalism in modern India

Maisie Drummond

Doctoral Candidate, Newcastle University

Newcastle to New York: Tom Pickard and the transnational networks of Late-Modernist poetry

Laura Fisher

Associate Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University

Girl on the line: Sex work, suffrage, and life writing in circulation, 1911-1930

Nayzha Khalil

Independent Artist, United States

What If? Jazz, and the musings of a first encounter

Brooks Marmon

Postdoctoral Scholar, Ohio State University

African journeys at the Hanna Holborn Gray: Orator Cook’s Liberia and John Gunther’s Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland

Katie McGettigan

Senior Lecturer, University of London

Specimens of the Plantationocene: Towards an Atlantic ecology of print, c. 1750-1850

Csaba Olasz

Doctoral Candidate, University of California, San Diego

The Humanist impulse: the movement against scientific reductionism, 1950-1980

Marina Popea

Research Fellow, Nottingham Trent University

The Covert networks of the boom: Latin American literature and the cultural Cold War

Zaki Rehman

Doctoral Candidate, University of Oxford

Ideas of Global Islam

Keara Sebold

Adjunct Lecturer, Boston University

A Morbid affection: Romance, murder, and the emergence of the Lesbian Threat

David Varel

Affiliate Faculty, Metropolitan State University of Denver

The Black Chicago School: Academic activism in the age of American apartheid