Alani Hicks-Bartlett, an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Hispanic Studies departments here at Brown, has been recognized for her work, the book Writing the Disabled Self in Early Modern Literature: Petrarch, Montaigne, Cervantes, with an extremely prestigious fellowship: the Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology. 

With research interests that encompass a large array of disciplines, Alani’s projects focus on gender and race in Medieval French literature, representations of disability in Medieval and Early Modern prose compositions, Early Modern Tragedy, and Medieval and Early Modern women’s writing and the (proto)feminist complaint tradition. Her research has been supported by numerous entities, including the Mellon Foundation, New York University’s Center for the Humanities, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Electronic Cultures Lab and Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Victoria.

The Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology is named after Bern Dibner  (1897-1988), an Ukrainian electrical engineer who founded two major libraries in the United States with missions of advancing historical scholarship in the field of science. After moving from Connecticut to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), his collection finally arrived at the Huntington Library in 2006, 67,000 rare volumes and a slew of scientific instruments strong. This enormously magnified the depth and scope of Huntington holdings. 

Each year, The Huntington, a collections-based research institute, invites some 2,000 scholars in the fields of history, literature, botanical science, art history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine to come from around the world to conduct academic research through its collections. The work they produce “results in academic monographs and scholarly articles, in bestselling and prizewinning books, in acclaimed documentary films, and in many of the history and social studies texts used to educate the nation’s schoolchildren.” Alani Hicks Bartlett will spend the full 2024-2025 academic year on research leave. Her fellowship is valued at 50,000 and spans nine to eleven months.