Congratulations to Camellia Paul for winning The John "Bud" Velde Graduate Fellowship from the Rare Book & Manuscript Library!
Camellia's proposed project, “Owlscapes in Archives: Owls, Myth, Natural History, and Ecological Imagination in South Asian and Transnational Print Cultures,” explores how owls have been represented, mythologized, and ecoculturally understood across literary, visual, and natural-history archives. Drawing on the RBML’s collections in early natural history, emblem books, ornithological illustration, travel writing, and colonial print culture, Camellia plans to examine how scientific knowledge, folklore, and cultural symbolism have shaped more-than-human relationships with owls across times and spaces. Through this archival work, she hopes to develop the concept of what I call the “owlscape” as a space where ecological realities intersect with cultural imagination, environmental history, and multispecies relations.