Tita Chico's Residential Fellowship in London

This spring, Tita Chico is in England supported by a Research and Scholarship Award and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute of English Studies, which is housed in the School for Advanced Studies at the University of London.

Chico is completing the research and writing of her book, Experimentalism: Literary Knowledge and Science in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Her research takes her to the British Library, the Royal Society, and the Wellcome Library. She has also benefitted from other residential fellowships at research libraries (the Newberry Library and the Harry Ransom Center) thanks to support from the Mellon Foundation. Chico believes funding for residential fellowships is vital because it allows scholars to test out their research and ideas in various intellectual communities, while deepening and strengthening their findings.

"My access to original materials and to the intellectual and academic life at British universities is vitally important to understanding the historical, theoretical, and institutional stakes of my literary critical work," said Chico.

With the current technology available, it seems as though non-digital archives are losing their value. Chico disagrees.

"There is no replacement for seeing the object as it is – there are traces of history on the printed or manuscript pages. Additionally, digital collections, while of great use, can project a sense of being complete, when much of the written record is not so neatly organized or catalogued and requires patient examination to sift through it all."