Green-Wood’s all-new research fellowship program in history provides support for current graduate students or early-career scholars to conduct independent research in any area of study that makes direct use of Green-Wood’s historical resources.
We’re pleased to introduce our 2024-2025 History Fellow, Emily Hayflick!
Emily Hayflick’s proposed project explores the history of leisure activities at The Green-Wood Cemetery through the lens of birding and other human-bird interactions. The project will draw on archival materials including environmental histories of the cemetery and records of recreational activities conducted on its grounds. This project aims to explore what it means for the cemetery to be both a space of mourning and leisure and how relationships between the landscapes of grieving and recreation have developed and shifted over the trajectory of Green-Wood’s history.
Emily Hayflick is an anthropology PhD candidate at Cornell University. She studies avian conservation legislation in the United States, exploring how people interact with the bodily materials of protected bird species.
Applications for the 2025-2026 fellowship will open in 2025.
About
The Green-Wood History Fellowship provides one selected awardee with unparalleled access to the Cemetery’s expansive landscape and extensive archives in support of their academic research. Over a 9-month period, the fellow will work closely alongside the Cemetery’s professional staff and ultimately have the opportunity to craft public history programs to share their research findings with a wider audience. Potential fields of study include the history of cemeteries or New York City, burial and funerary customs, environmental history, public health, demographics, landscape design, and more.
The fellowship is open to current graduate students or early-career scholars (no more than 5 years out from their PhD). For details and to apply, click here.
Resources
Opportunities to explore and examine history at Green-Wood abound. Green-Wood’s institutional archives comprise an immense collection of meticulously preserved records, connected to over half a million individuals (580,000 in total) interred at Green-Wood. Dating back to 1838, the archival collections include burial files, documentation of the Cemetery’s founding, business records of the Cemetery, transfer records, architectural drawings, photographs, and more. In addition, Green-Wood has a collection of over 10,000 historical artifacts (including art, photographs, ephemera, and more) gathered in the last two decades, as well as hundreds of thousands of historical monuments across the grounds.
Learn more about Green-Wood’s archival collections here, and be sure to read this enlightening essay about what there is to discover.