Brandao Wins Multiple Research Grants

Brandao Wins Multiple Research Grants

Dr. José António Brandão, a specialist in New France and First Nations history, has been awarded several prestigious research awards in support of his current work on the French Michilimackinac Research Project (FMRP).

The FMRP, of which Brandão is a co-director, aims to identify and translate French language materials related to the early history of Michigan, especially of the Straits of Mackinac region. The first award, which totals $129,000 over five years, was given directly to Mackinac State Historic Parks by the Florence Gould Foundation. This grant will cover travel and research support for Brandao, but also provides funding to acquire additional materials for the French Michilimackinac Research Project Collection and pay for other researchers working in Canadian archives on behalf of the project. The FMRP Collection, which is housed at Western Michigan University represents one of the largest collections outside of France and Canada of French language documents related to the French presence in North America.

While he was hoping for sabbatical funding, Brandão was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Mackinac Parks and Gould Foundation had provided support for the entire FMRP. The next award, however, came as an even bigger surprise.

Brandão learned in late April that he had also been awarded the Lester J. Cappon Fellowship in Documentary Editing from the Newberry Library in Chicago, home to collections that are central to his research. This award provides up to $5000 to support historical editing projects based on Newberry sources, including photocopying, digitization, copyright fees, publication subventions, and other costs associated with the publication of a edited document or collection of edited documents.. The Cappon grant, which also provides for three months of residency at the Newberry, came as a surprise to Brandão because he did not apply for grant. Rather, as Dr. Buddy Gray, Chair of the Department of History , notes, "the grants committee of the Newberry, at their own initiative, placed Brandao into this category in recognition of his outstanding reputation as a scholar of New France" and the strength of his grant proposal.

With these prestigious grants in tow, Dr. Brandão will be on sabbatical during the 2010-11 academic year, spending time at the Newberry and working on the forthcoming book, Memoires of Michilimackinac. The proposed project is a book of translated documents related to the French presence in the straits region of Michigan in the years up to 1718. The book will offer corrected, unabridged, and properly annotated and edited versions of three important documents related to the French presence and French-Native relations in the Great Lakes Region. The introduction will serve to place all of the documents in context, summarize their major findings about Michilimackinac, Native cultures, French imperial ambitions in the Great Lakes Region, and possibly resolve the vexing historical question about Louis La Porte de Louvigny's lost memoire and Antoine Laumet, dit Lamothe Cadillac's lost map. The book will be the fourth volume in the series of publications growing out of the French Michilimackinac Research Project which Brandão co-directs with Steven Brisson of Mackinac State Historic Parks. Brandão is the FMRP's academic director.