Professor Vera Keller of the Robert D. Clark Honors College is among 20 scholars awarded a fellowship to the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.

The highly competitive awards are given to early-career scholars for studies in the field of critical bibliographies. The fellows will participate in a three-year program, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography, whose aim is to reinvigorate bibliographical studies within the humanities.

Fellows will receive advanced, intensive training in the analysis of textual artifacts. Led by faculty drawn from the bibliographical community and professionals in allied fields, fellows will attend annual research-oriented seminars at Rare Book School and at major special collections libraries nationwide. Fellows will receive stipends to support research related travel to special collections and additional funds to host academic symposia at their home institutions.

Keller, who earned her doctorate in history at Princeton University, is a historian of science and an early modern Europeanist. She is interested in the co-production of science and politics and is the author of more than a dozen articles and book chapters on the history of friendship, constitutions, wish lists, celebrity, secrets, inventions, alchemy, magic and the reason of state.

Her first book project, "The Wish List: Knowledge and Interest, 1575–1725," explores how the literary technology of desiderata reshaped the body of knowledge and its relationship to the body politic in early modern Europe.