ABOUT ME : Jamie Bolker
I am an incoming Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Long-Term Fellow at the Newberry Library for the 2020-21 academic year. I received my PhD in early American and Atlantic literatures from Fordham University My book project, "Lost and Found: Wayfinding in Early America,” considers how getting physically lost shaped notions of individual identity during a period in which selfhood was shifting from Puritan notions of wilderness as inimical to selfhood toward Transcendentalist ideals of finding oneself in nature. Each chapter centers on figures whose identities were made or unmade throughout their journeys, such as lone female travellers, shipwrecked adventurers, frontiersmen, enslaved fugitives, and land surveyors.
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This website is dedicated to the material culture of navigation and its aesthetics that are best represented beyond the confines of a text-heavy book project.
I have received research fellowships from Fordham University, Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, Newberry Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, and Winterthur Museum and Library, in addition to grants from the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
For more on my academic work, please visit my personal website.