Morse Fellows

Matthew Daniel Mason is an archivist responsible for processing photographs and other visual resources at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. He has also worked in archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society and at Montana State University as well as received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Memphis (2008) and a Master of Arts in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and Information Studies (2003). In addition to his more than two decades of archival work, Dr. Mason teaches courses in American history and the history of photography at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut.  He is also a co-author of People of the Big Voice: Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaick, 1879-1942 (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011) and Through a Woman’s Eye: The Early 20th Century Photography of Alabama’s Edith Morgan (New South Books, 2015).

Scott Miller received his B.A. (1989), M.A. (1989), and Ph.D. (1994) from Harvard University, where he worked as a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Subsequently, he traveled to the California Institute of Technology where he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Robert Grubbs until 1996. For the following decade, Professor Miller was a member of the faculty at Boston College, until joining the faculty at Yale University in 2006. In 2008, he was appointed as the Irénée duPont Professor of Chemistry. From 2009-2015, he served as the Chairperson of the Chemistry Department, and from 2015-2017 as the Divisional Director for Science.

Originally from south Georgia, David Lawrence Morse is a fiction writer, playwright, and the director of the Writing Program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale.  His work has appeared in The Washington Post, One Story, Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere.  His first collection of stories, The Book of Disbelieving, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in July 2023.  The stories in the collection tend toward the fantastic and the speculative—fables that dramatize our era’s crisis of faith in the nature and meaning of reality.  It is a concern with language and its ability to distort or capture reality that animates his teaching at the Jackson School, where as a writing instructor he offers courses on policy writing and on disinformation and the craft of persuasion.  Prior to coming to Yale, he taught for nearly twenty years at the University of Michigan, where in addition to a variety of writing classes he also taught courses on utopianism and the politics and ethics of lying.  His first play, Quartet, concerning Beethoven’s composition of the late string quartets, was performed by the Takács Quartet and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.