Megan Flattley awarded Fulbright-Hays Fellowship

The Newcomb Art Department is thrilled to announce that Megan Flattley, PhD candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane, has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays DDRA (Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad) 12-month grant. She plans to conduct research in Mexico City June 2021 to May 2022. Her dissertation, “Out of the Fragments, New Worlds: Perspective and Spatiality in the Work of Diego Rivera, 1913-1933” analyzes how Rivera responded to Cubism’s break with linear perspective in his transition from easel painting to mural work. Her research foregrounds Rivera’s place in an international network of avant-garde artists concerned with modernist theories of space and revolutionary politics. Congratulations, Megan!!! 

Image: Rivera’s mural in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Alumni news: Shannah Rose named Kress fellow

Shannah Rose (MA, Art History, 2019) was named a 2019 recipient of the Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in Italian at the Middlebury Language Schools. As a Kress Fellow, she will enroll in Middlebury’s intensive 7-week language immersion program held this summer at Mills College in Oakland, California. In fall 2019, Shannah will continue her research in medieval and early modern Italian art history as a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Ph.D. candidate Patricia Lagarde named a Fulbright-Hays fellow

As a 2019 Fulbright-Hays fellow, Patricia Alexander Lagarde, a doctoral candidate in art history and Latin American studies, will conduct research in Peru for seven months at Chavín de Huántar, a ceremonial center in the Andes mountains that dates to 1200-500 BCE. She will focus on a group of anthropomorphic stone sculptures known as the tenon heads that were installed on the exterior walls of the temple architecture. Her project will explore the variety in style, the assortment in material, and the overall viewer experience of the sculptures. Lagarde will be an affiliate with the Chavín International Research Center (Centro Internacional de Investigación de Chavín) where she will work with archeologists to examine what the sculptures’ roles were in the ceremonial and religious traditions at the time. While only one sculpture is still installed at the site, more than 100 existed, varying in shape and size. This fellowship will support Lagarde’s goal to create a comprehensive catalog of the tenon heads at Chavín de Huántar.  Studying their materiality, Lagarde hopes to gain a greater understanding of the Ancient Andean peoples’ perspective of the natural landscape as animate—she’s interested in how specific stones were chosen, potentially representing specific regions, communities, or ancestors.

Michelle Foa awarded a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship

Professor Michelle Foa has been awarded a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art for the 2018-2019 academic year.  There, she will research the National Gallery’s rich Degas collection and work on her book manuscript, The Matter of Degas: Art and Materiality in Later 19th-Century Paris. 

Mia Bagneris: Redefining the Early African Diaspora

Assistant Professor Mia L. Bagneris, the Jesse Poesch Junior Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department and her collaborator Anna Arabindan-Kesson of Princeton University's Department of Art and Archaeology have won an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for their project Beyond Recovery: Reframing the Dialogues of Early African Diaspora Art History, c. 1700-1900. The book aims to redefine early African diaspora art history by revealing and reconsidering the varying entanglements of artists of African descent—and the art histories they have often been written out of—and to offer a model for breaking new ground in the field.

Read more about Prof. Bagneris' work on The Representation of Enslaved Mixed-Race Women in British Art in News from the Field, School of Liberal Arts newsletter, April 2017.

Stephanie Porras awarded grants and fellowships for research and publication

Assistant Professor Stephanie Porras' forthcoming book Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (Penn State University Press, 2016) proposes a new understanding of Bruegel as an artist deeply concerned with history. For this work Dr. Porras has received a Millard Meiss Publication Award from the College Art Association, a Kress publication grant from the Renaissance Society of America, as well as a Historians of Netherlandish Art Fellowship award. 

Dr. Porras has also been awarded a short term fellowship at the New York Public Library this May, where she will be conducting research on her next book project, Maerten de Vos: a Renaissance Life in between. This project is a micro history of an understudied yet ubiquitous early modern artist, considering the impact of travel, the wars of religion and the dawn of globalization on artistic identity and visual culture.

[Peasant Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, Austria]

Jennifer Saracino named Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellow

Jennifer Saracino, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies, has been appointed as a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies for the academic year of 2015-2016. 

As a fellow, she will be pursuing research for her Ph.D. dissertation project entitled, "Shifting Landscape: Depictions of Environmental & Cultural Disruption in the Mapa Uppsala." The Mapa Uppsala is one of the earliest maps of post-Conquest Mexico City painted by indigenous hands. By combining studies of Mesoamerican and European cartography with a formal analysis of the Mapa Uppsala, she plans to demonstrate how the Mapa Uppsala is a testament to the lived experience of early colonial artists living in Mexico-Tenochtitlan.​