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By working together as Radcliffe fellows, four historians were emboldened to explore new approaches to their work.

Suzanne Lebsock RI ’07 arrived last year as a Radcliffe fellow intending to make a documentary about black and white women who worked together on a farm in Virginia during World War II. While the Rutgers University history professor still wants to work on that project, she was drawn to another story, of a tornado that devastated her home city of Fargo, North Dakota, when she was a child. She wrote a few pages about the topic, and it could have ended there. But her colleagues in a unique Radcliffe cluster urged her to expand it into a full-length work, which she now hopes to finish over the summer.

“Their unanimous opinion was that there was a book in it,” she says. “It was a very helpful push in the direction of doing something more ambitious than I probably thought.”

That was one of the ways in which the cluster helped shape the experience of the four historians who arrived at Radcliffe as a team, in contrast to the traditional “lone wolf” approach, as one dubbed it, of humanities professors researching and writing works of scholarship. Such collaboration is common in the world of science, and indeed Radcliffe has hosted clusters of scientists who worked together on such subjects as cosmology and linguistics. But the Institute has never before brought together fellows in the humanities in a cluster arrangement.

Although the members of the humanities cluster had no common project—each is writing his or her own book—they did have a common purpose: offering support and sharing ideas as each explored the process of uncovering essential truths of history and the people who make it.

“It really made a difference,” says John Demos RI ’07, a history professor at Yale University. “Becoming a wolf pack really does extend and deepen our individual processes.”

In this case, the leader of the pack was Jane Kamensky RI ’07, a history professor at Brandeis University. A Bunting fellow at Radcliffe in 1996–1997, she returned to Harvard in 2004–2005 on a fellowship at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Working there with a small cohort of scholars inspired her to propose a similar cluster experience at Radcliffe.

Kamensky shared the idea with Demos, her graduate school advisor at Yale, who expressed interest in joining the group. She didn’t personally know the other two cluster members, Lebsock and William S. McFeely RI ’07, a professor of the humanities emeritus at the University of Georgia, but she foresaw mutual connections based on their work.

“I think all of us had a serious and sustained interest in history writing and the ways in which historians can re-imagine themselves as authors who care about things like character development, which has also been a powerful strand of our work,” says Kamensky.

They came together to explore “the promise and perils of biography as a mode for understanding the past,” according to Kamensky’s cluster proposal. Those perils, as she outlined, include tendencies to advocate for or prosecute subjects and to concentrate only on the eminent or advantaged. “The most able and determined biographers triumph over these tendencies,” she wrote.

Once the fellowship began, cluster members met weekly, sharing their own histories and their writings. In addition, the group learned from practitioners of the craft, establishing a “biography table” to which they invited several authors—including Dean Drew Gilpin Faust, Stephen Greenblatt (the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard), and Kenneth Silverman—to speak about their work.

Yet none of the cluster members are writing conventional biographies. As Lebsock is recounting the Fargo tornado, Demos is writing a book on the nineteenth-century Foreign Mission School in Connecticut, and McFeely is studying World War I ambulance drivers. Even Kamensky’s work, on the life of the famed portraitist Gilbert Stuart, will look as much at Stuart’s subjects and the times in which they lived as at the painter himself.

Nevertheless, says Demos, biography is embedded in their projects. His forthcoming book, called “The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic,” will portray the people behind the school that set out to convert “heathens” from around the world to Christianity. All of the cluster members share an interest in “person-centered history” rather than analysis, he says.

“Although I still don’t call myself a biographer, I was moved by our discussions to think more of the biographical approach to the work,” says Demos.

One of the cluster members is a biographer, and a renowned one at that. McFeely has written three biographies, including Grant: A Biography (Norton, 1981), which won both the Pulitzer and the Parkman Prize. Even with those accolades, he says, the cluster experience reinforced the value of his work through the encouragement of his colleagues.

“I was silently cheering at several of the cluster sessions when I realized that I kind of do know what I’m doing in this writing world,” McFeely says. “All these huge number of years I’ve been alive, I haven’t had the same confidence about my work.”

The cluster also gave him the confidence to embark on a new project, just as it did for Lebsock. McFeely originally planned to study the marriages of Henry and Clover Adams and Clarence and Ada King. But when he raised the topic of writing about wartime experiences from an unusual perspective, the others encouraged him to take that path.

Now he says he’s energized and working faster than usual, chronicling the stories of US college students who signed on to drive ambulances for the French army. His book will offer insight into the psychological problems many drivers faced after seeing the horrors of the World War I trenches, which he compares to the experiences of medics who served in the Vietnam War. The subject is neither conventional biography nor conventional history, says McFeely—something that could be said for the projects of all the cluster members.

“We are four historians willing to push the boundaries,” he says. “We’re not doing kosher history.”

That’s certainly true for Lebsock, who is tapping her own childhood experience, incorporating memoir along with the history of others who lived through the tragedy, including one woman, alive today, who lost six of her seven children. Lebsock says the book will encompass individual and family stories as well as an exploration of the region and the era.

Likewise, Kamensky’s book on Stuart will explore his life and work but also art and politics and the creation of national identity in the early republic. In a presentation the group made to other Radcliffe fellows, Kamensky noted that all of the cluster members are trying to tell stories of a nation through the lives of individuals. “All four of us identify history as much with art as with science,” she says. “I think that impulse brings individuals quite strongly to the fore.”

And those individual stories were enhanced, she says, by the power of a group to consider them.

Lewis I. Rice is a freelance writer based in Boston.

Image by Christopher Silas Neal