Congratulations to the 2026 New Scholars!

Jacob Blanck New Scholar: Cassandra Gillig (Northwestern University) ↑

I Have Stone Butch Blues: Tracing the Publication Lineage of a Trans Bestseller

“I Have Stone Butch Blues” outlines the publication and distribution history of Leslie Feinberg’s groundbreaking 1993 novel and examines how this significant work of trans literature arises from and transforms lesbian publishing. Published in the height of 90s conflicts around trans-exclusion in lesbian spaces, the book became a massive success and cultural phenomenon, outselling the average Firebrand title 20 times over. I read Stone Butch Blues’s publication records, editorial correspondence, contracts, fanmail, desk copy requests, and marketing materials to analyze the components of a genre-changing independent press bestseller. The ways Stone Butch Blues has been distributed and read have a lot to teach us about how LGBT publishing has changed in the past thirty years and the ways that minoritized literary titles can signal changing political tides and new academic field formations. This bibliographic research illuminates the struggles, labor, and intersectional commitments behind the continued publication of this novel, offering a new perspective on its enduring legacy.

About the Scholar: Cassandra Gillig

Cassandra Gillig is a writer and MFA/MA candidate in the Creative Non-fiction Program at Northwestern University. For work on Leslie Feinberg and Firebrand Books, Gillig was a 2024 Cornell University Zwickler Research fellow. Gillig’s project on Davina Anne Gabriel and TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism received a 2025 KC Inspiration Grant and is part of the forthcoming book and digital archive An Era of Rights, published by the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin New Scholar: Mindi Zhang (UCLA) ↑

Biblio-Internationalism: Chinese Rare Books and Transpacific Alliance between the National Library of Beiping and the Library of Congress, 1926-1945

In the two decades before and during WWII, Yuan Tongli, director of the National Library of Beiping (NLB), forged a partnership between his fledgling institution and the Library of Congress (LC), in which Yuan helped obtain valuable editions for LC and arranged for Chinese scholars to offer cataloging service. My paper probes into Yuan’s seemingly unfathomable transfer of rare Chinese books to the U.S. I argue that Yuan’s actions were motivated by a cultural internationalism involving both ideal and practical considerations. On the one hand, he and American Sinologists shared a belief in the importance of the mutual understanding of culture and history between peoples for the prosperity and peace of an increasingly interconnected world. On the other hand, Yuan aimed to curry favor with American partners in return for resources that his library—and the Chinese research community at large—desperately needed, at a time when socio-political upheavals in China severely disrupted the work of Chinese scholars and scientists. Rare books became at once a fountain for a beautiful vision of the future between the two republics and an asset in exchange for material support vital to Chinese academic nation building. I further unpack the actual transfer of the books, highlighting three critical factors: a socio-institutional network that connected old-fashioned bibliophiles in North China to Sinologists in Washington D.C.; knowledge of bibliography that allowed for identifying, studying, and cataloging books; and the latest photographic technologies that facilitated long-distance exchange of important texts. Drawing on archival records and published primary sources, this paper reconstructs the human agency and material processes behind the transpacific movement of Chinese rare books.

About the Scholar: Mindi Zhang

Mindi Zhang is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese history at UCLA. He is broadly interested in the history of books, history of libraries, and history of science and technology. Zhang’s dissertation examines the institutionalization of Chinese research libraries in the first half of the twentieth century against a backdrop of Sino-US exchange. It examines how these institutions blended early modern Chinese bibliographical tradition with twentieth-century library methods and technologies. Part of the dissertation traces the growth of Sinological collections in the U.S. in which Chinese librarians and bibliographers played a vital role. Zhang is a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School.

D.F. McKenzie New Scholar: Clara Shaw (Courtauld Institute of Art) ↑

Printing for the People: The Neolith a Lithographic Magazine 1907-1908

Between November 1907 and August 1908 four issues of The Neolith, an art and literature magazine, were published in London. While its contents did not generally diverge from similar formats - original artwork shown alongside contemporary prose and poetry - its uniqueness lay in its production. Typically, such periodicals were bifurcated by printing process, segregating typescript bodies of text from the thematically unrelated images produced by various print mediums. The Neolith instead integrated its material by employing a single medium — lithography — for cover, artwork, and text. Neither word nor work took precedence. The final result possessed the intimacy and immediacy of a manuscript, aided by the sketchlike images and handwritten texts. This paper explores unpublished interviews, period newspaper articles, and foremost the issues themselves to uncover the motivations and implications behind this unusual project. 

For the first time, the paper considers The Neolith within two concurrent contexts: the rehabilitation of lithography’s artistic reputation and the rising concern with socio-economic inequality after the Liberal Party’s landslide win in 1906. Originally conceptualised as a school magazine, the project quickly expanded, ultimately involving not only lithographers at the school, but established international artists, a leader of the calligraphic revival, and a number of acclaimed socialist authors. The research reveals that The Neolith was marketed to the general public as an affordable way to acquire high quality art and literature. This finding is aided by new analysis of the symbiotic relationship between the lithographic images and the hand-written text - each largely focused on the working class and contemporary concerns about poverty - which argues for a unified address by artists and authors to the British people.

About the Scholar: Clara Shaw

Clara Shaw is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art specialising in printmaking histories. She is currently exploring the rhetoric and cultural networks related to the second revival of artistic lithography in Britain c. 1900-1920. She received her Masters in the history of art from the Courtauld and her Bachelors in art history and museum studies from Mount Holyoke College. She has presented on the materiality of lithography at the 2025 Association for Art History Annual Conference and is a reviews editor for ‘Immediations: The Courtauld Institute of Art Journal of Postgraduate Research’.

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