Amanda Stuckey
The fellowship committee received and reviewed 22 applications, many of them quite strong. We had no difficulty, however, in agreeing unanimously on Amanda Stuckey as the fellowship recipient for 2017. A PhD candidate in American Studies at the College of William and Mary, she is writing a dissertation on “Reading Bodies: Disability and the Book in American Culture, 1789-1886.” Her well-structured proposal addresses a subset of this topic, printing for the blind, and she plans to use her APHA fellowship to support a research trip to the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, MA. From an early period Perkins, the first school for the blind established in the United States, engaged in printing for the blind, and their library and archives will provide an excellent source for studying this history.