Congratulations to the 2026-2027 recipients of the John ‘Bud’ Velde Graduate Fellowship: Megi Mecolli, Camellia Paul, and Sophie Weinberg! Read on to learn more about what RBML’s Velde Graduate Fellows are up to this academic year.
Megi Mecolli
My project is centered on transcribing Pre-1650 MS 0102, the “Crafte of Conjureynge” manuscript, an Elizabethan spellbook which is estimated to date to the 1590s. Through this transcription work, I will be researching the three different scripts within the manuscript which date to the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries respectively, to further scrutinize how the spellbook configures the displays of conjuration, magical power, and subjugation with sociopolitical power and subjugation over the course of three centuries of guardianship.
Camellia Paul
My proposed project, “Owlscapes in Archives: Owls, Myth, Natural History, and Ecological Imagination in South Asian and Transnational Print Cultures,” explores how owls have been represented, mythologized, and ecoculturally understood across literary, visual, and natural-history archives. Drawing on the RBML’s collections in early natural history, emblem books, ornithological illustration, travel writing, and colonial print culture, I plan to examine how scientific knowledge, folklore, and cultural symbolism have shaped more-than-human relationships with owls across times and spaces. Through this archival work, I hope to develop the concept of what I call the “owlscape” as a space where ecological realities intersect with cultural imagination, environmental history, and multispecies relations.
Sophie Weinberg
My project examines the print output of the stationer Elizabeth Nutt (fl. 1680s–1746). I suggest that careful bibliographic analysis of the press figures present in Nutt’s books between 1716 and 1746 will surface patterns in the rate and scale of Elizabeth’s print production. Over the course of this fellowship, I hope to use these typographic indicators to test a new means of tracking women’s labor, agency, and business methods in the early modern book trade.