Support for Ben Franklin's world comes from the

Omaha Institute of Early American History and Culture.

Since 1945, the Omaha Institute has offered postdoctoral fellowships.

Part of the OI's core mission is to support scholars who are

turning their dissertation research into significant published scholarship,

scholarship that will help frame and expand our knowledge of early American

history.

Ryan Kishani Poor, an assistant professor of history

at Northern Arizona University,

and a recent O-I postdoctoral fellow

tells us about his fellowship experience and why he thinks it was important.

At the Al-Mahundu Institute, I was the 2014-to-2016 postdoctoral fellow.

This is a very old fellowship that goes back decades. In particular, my work really

looks at 17th and 18th century Mexico. So actually I worked in the Spanish Atlantic

and fall into what folks at the Omaha Landahundro Institute and started to call the vast early Americas.

At the Ohmahundra Institute, the focus has long been trying to figure out what life on the

ground looked like at a real granular level and in the case of my own work with disease in the body

that the way that individuals saw their own bodies, their own sicknesses, look to others around them to sort of find their own pathways.

And in that sense to either reinforce existing social relationships

or at times challenge them.

At the Emmahundo Institute, I think the goal of bringing fellows in residence into the Institute

is really to build a community of scholars that work across generations where you have

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