Two members of CML's community—center Director George D. Oberle and Graduate Research Assistant David Armstrong—have been selected for the 2027-2028 class of fellows hosted by George Washington's Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. The fellowships fund research on the early American period across multiple disciplines, andeligibility extends not just to academics but also curators, preservationists, public history practitioners, and independent scholars. Fellows receive stipends, travel reimbursement, and housing on library grounds for periods of one to six months, along with access to the library's contents and its staff's expertise.
Armstrong, a Ph.D. candidate, will use the opportunity to further his thesis on "Family Imperialism: The Mason Family of Virginia and the Expansion of the American Empire, 1787-1861." The dissertation explores the role of George Mason IV's descendants in the U.S. imperial endeavor.
CML's other fellow, Oberle, who holds the positions of University Libraries History Librarian and an associate (term) professor of history, will be targeting Mount Vernon's own archive as a subject. In pursuit of his next book, Constructing American Histories: Building the Counter Archive in the United States, Oberle seeks to look past the historic site's identity as a tourist site to understand it as one of the country's early archival institutions. He wants to study the archive's growth and redefinitions over time, starting with the first president's own documents, expanding with the addition of conserved spaces, archaeology and objects, and ultimately adapting to accommodate shifts in cultural perspective.
Augmenting Washington's own archive, "the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association collected and preserved the material culture at Mount Vernon," Oberle explained, "before the archive further evolved in response to what I am calling 'counter archival movements' among groups such as African American communities in places like Gum Springs." His fellowship research will examine the role of "these three forms of archival production in understanding how archives and counter-archives served as sites of resistance and the iterative process of developing U.S. historical identities," the subject of his book-in-progress on the creation and dissemination of knowledge in the United States. The research builds on his recently published Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic, exploring early debates over knowledge institutions' role in promoting an informed U.S. electorate.