July 30, 2025 Library of Congress Awards 2025–2026 National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellowships

The Library of Congress announced today that it has awarded its 2025–2026 National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellowships to Briand Gentry, David Hanlon, and David Saiz. Each awardee will receive a two-week fellowship to conduct original research in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, which houses one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of stereoscopic and photographic materials.

Established in 2022 through a generous donation from the National Stereoscopic Association, the fellowship promotes advanced scholarship in stereoscopy and the history of photography. The Library’s extensive holdings include over 15 million photographs, rare publications, manuscripts and historic newspapers. More than 60,000 stereographs – paired images that produce a three-dimensional effect when viewed through a stereoscope – have been digitized and are available online at  loc.gov/pictures.

Stereographs were a popular form of visual entertainment from the Civil War era through the early 20th century when new technologies like motion pictures captured the public’s attention, and they continue to influence today’s immersive media technologies, such as virtual reality. The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division serves as the nation’s leading research center for this format, holding stereographs dating from early daguerreotypes in the 1850s to published sets from the 1930s.

National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellows

Briand (Brinni) Gentry

Ph.D. candidate, Film, Television, and Media, University of Michigan

Gentry’s dissertation, “Enchanting Otherworld at Empire’s Edge: Hawaii in Early 20th Century U.S. Popular Culture,” explores portrayals of Hawaii as an “authentically other” paradise across visual media from 1890 to 1940. At the Library, she will examine how stereographs contributed to immersive imperial narratives, their influence on 1930s cinematic depictions of Hawaiian scenery, and their role in shaping American perceptions through displays at late 19th-century World’s Fairs.

David R. Hanlon

Professor, St. Louis Community College at Meramec

Hanlon will study the early photographic innovations of Frederick and William Langenheim, who helped pioneer paper portraiture, developed commercial glass formats, and created the first American stereograph series. His research focuses on their 1850s stereographs and hyalotypes of Eastern U.S. scenes, comparing them to works by contemporary lithographers and photographers to shed light on the brothers’ aesthetic and commercial influence.

David P. Saiz

Ph.D. candidate in Art History, Princeton University (Certificate in African American Studies)

Saiz will analyze two photographic views of Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration – one a stereograph, the other a single image from a stereo negative. His research explores how photography captured an unfinished U.S. Capitol and Thomas Crawford’s incomplete Progress of Civilization sculpture, examining how visual representations of incompletion shaped cultural narratives about the event and its symbolism.

The National Stereoscopic Association Research Fellowship is awarded annually by the Library to support original scholarship utilizing its extensive stereoscopic photography collections. For more information, visit:
aj.sunback.homes/research-centers/prints-and-photographs.

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