Professor Faflik’s research on Benjamin Franklin figures as a chapter in his current book project, a historical study of the role that gifting has played in the at times unpredictable circulation of American literature. 

With the funding from his Faculty Research Grant, he will spend a month-long residence at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where he will explore the archival evidence of Franklin’s famous Poor Richard’s Almanac having once enjoyed the status of the most versatile of literary gifts: frequently given by American parents to their children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long before it became common reading in the public primary schools of a newly independent Brazil in the decades after 1822.