The Mary Baker Eddy Library has awarded three fellowships in 2011 to Dr. G. Kurt Piehler, Ashley Squires, and Dr. Paul Eli Ivey.
The Mary Baker Eddy Library awards fellowships to academic scholars and independent researchers for research in its collections. The Library collections are the primary resource for information about Mary Baker Eddy’s life and ideas and the history of the Christian Science movement. Library research fellowships are designed to support original contributions to scholarship and help further research by established scholars, graduate students, and recent graduates just beginning their academic careers. Relevant areas of research include the fields of women’s history, spirituality and health, religious studies, nineteenth-century history, cultural and social history, architecture, and journalism.
Dr. G. Kurt Piehler, Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, is a specialist in U.S. history with an emphasis on the twentieth century, American military history, social and cultural history, public history, oral history, and historical editing.
Piehler has authored and edited many works, including Remembering War the American Way and World War II in the American Soldiers’ Lives Series; he was co-editor of Major Problems in American Military History, and wrote and was featured in “The War That Transformed a Generation,“ a documentary that aired on the History Channel. He has lectured at, chaired, and organized thirty-seven scholarly conferences, taught twenty-one courses and is included in numerous books, journals, and scholarly reference works. He has also edited eight works and over two dozen book series. The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives, which he co-edited with Rosemary Mariner, received the 2010 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and America Culture.
Dr. Piehler has been awarded countless grants and has been a fellow at several institutions, including the Jacob Rader Marcus Center, the American Jewish Archives, the Presbyterian Historical Society, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution. He received a Fulbright Fellowship in Japan at Kobe University and Kyoto University.
Ashley Squires is a Ph.D. candidate and is Assistant Instructor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She has also taught and contributed to scholarship in other departments and programs at University of Texas at Austin, including the Rhetoric and Writing Department, as well as the Students Partnering for Undergraduate Rhetoric Success program. As a research assistant in the Religious Studies Department, she aided in the completion of a monograph entitled America’s Church: The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital by Thomas A Tweed, published in June of this year. Squires is the recipient of several awards and honors from the University of Texas at Austin, including the Excellence Fellowship, Professional Development Award, and Texas Blazers Faculty Excellence Award.
Dr. Paul Eli Ivey is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona, where he teaches modern and contemporary art and theory. His primary research interests concern alternative religions in the American-built environment.
Dr. Ivey is the author of Prayers in Stone: Christian Science Architecture in the United States, 1894-1930. He contributed the essay “Solon Beman and the Metaphysics of Christian Science Architecture” to the Chicago Architectural Club Journal, and authored “Christian Science Architecture in the American City,” which appeared in Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Urban Commercial Culture. He has contributed his original research to seven scholarly books, made over ten scholarly presentations, and has written numerous refereed journal articles, non-refereed catalogue essays and book reviews.
Dr. Ivey began working at The Mary Baker Eddy Library to research Christian Science architecture in Britain as a Library Fellow in 2004. He also recently published the entry on “Christian Science,” with help from Mary Baker Eddy Library researchers, in the Encyclopedia of Religion in America. To read some of Dr. Ivey’s research done on Christian Science architecture, see his article entitled “Building Respectability: Christian Science Architecture in the USA and its Influence in Europe” on The Mary Baker Eddy Library’s website, www.mbelibrary.org.
