LSU Libraries selected three scholars to receive Special Collections Research Grants during the 2024-2025 academic year for their projects using materials in Special Collections’ holdings. These grants cover funds for travel, lodging, and other types of support associated with a research trip to Hill Memorial Library. We look forward to working with the following awardees:

Brittany Marshall is a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers University. Her research examines connotations of ‘silence’ and ‘noise’ in 20th-century Black women’s literature. Using Pinkie Gordon Lane as its point of origin, this research positions Lane as a ‘quiet poet’ whose work exists outside the bounds of easily identifiable or ‘traditional’ conventions of Black poetics due to its reliance on Louisiana flora and fauna. At LSU, Marshall will study Lane’s papers to weave a thread between her poetry and her pedagogy to argue for a new reading/interpretive method that locates Black poetics in the quiet and silent spaces of Louisiana’s natural environment. Studying her poetry and professional life will help Marshall recover Lane’s work from obscurity to expand the circuit of Black poetry aesthetics and the legacy of the Black Arts Movement in the South. Moreover, this research project is part of a broader conversation about the relationship between the natural world and Black women intellectuals in the South.
 

Olivier Péloquin is a PhD candidate in history at Rice University. His dissertation, tentatively titled, Reconstructing La Nouvelle-Orléans: Race, Citizenship, and Empire in the French Atlantic World, 1862-1877, proposes a comprehensive study of New Orleans’ White and Afro-Creole communities during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Through familial and business correspondences, newspapers, and French consular archives, his work provides a transnational perspective on the ideological and political debates over emancipation, the struggles for racial equality, and the redefinition of white supremacy in the aftermath of slavery. The research delves into the intertwined and often divisive paths of the Creoles, at home and abroad, through several key historical events such as New Orleans’ military occupation and wartime emancipation, Confederate diplomacy in Paris, Reconstruction-era civil rights activism, the White League insurgencies, and the Louisiana Unification Movement. Thus, he connects the challenges of the Reconstruction era to a global and interconnected French-speaking world.  

Betsy Schlabach, PhD, is an associate professor of history at Lawrence University. In this article-length project, she investigates the links between Homer A. Plessy’s arrest for violating the Separate Car Act and subsequent Supreme Court Case, and the Louisiana Legislature Anti-Lottery Act of 1894. The former resulted in federally supported segregation and the latter led to the creation of a vibrant informal lottery in New Orleans. There is considerable and conspicuous overlap in the names of the judges and detectives arresting lottery offenders and those involved in the adjudication of Plessy’s arrest and trial for violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act. Consulting LSU's Special Collections will help Schlabach make sense of these overlaps. It is her hope that by tracking Plessy’s work before and after the Supreme Court’s ruling, she can prove that New Orleans’ formal and informal labor designations ossified at the same moment as the city’s racial schemas.