April 25, 2016

The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to announce the recipients of the twenty-fifth annual Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art, supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. The 11 advanced graduate students are pursuing promising research in object- and image-based US art history.
 
“This fellowship program represents a longstanding partnership between the Luce Foundation and ACLS to support new generations of scholars working within the field of US art history,” said Matthew Goldfeder, director of fellowship programs at ACLS. “Over the past 25 years, 240 fellows have helped strengthen the field, becoming leaders at their institutions and in their intellectual domains. This year’s 11 newest awardees carry on that tradition as they develop their original and significant contributions to knowledge.”
 
Fellows will spend the academic year researching and writing their dissertations at any site appropriate for their work. The cohort also includes the second Ellen Holtzman Fellow, named for the Luce Foundation’s past program director of American art in celebration of her two decades of achievements in that role.
 
Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellows and project titles are listed below; for more information about the recipients and their projects, click here.
 
Marissa Howard Baker (University of Illinois, Chicago) The Nation Within: Chicago’s Black Arts Movement and the Figuration of Black Liberation
 
Kim Bobier (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Representing and Refracting the Civil Rights Movement in Late Twentieth-Century Art
 
Rachel Hooper (Rice University) American Art Histories: Framing Race after the Civil War
 
Joss Kiely (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) The Infrastructure of Itinerancy: Aviation, American Economic Imperialism, and the Late Modern Architecture of Minoru Yamasaki, 1951-1986
 
Ashley Lazevnick, Ellen Holtzman Fellow (Princeton University) Precisionism in the Long 1920s
 
Ellen Macfarlane (Princeton University) Group f.64 Photography and the Object World
 
Kimberly Minor (University of Oklahoma) Pictographic Motifs: Memory and Masculinity on the Upper Missouri
 
Emma Rose Silverman (University of California, Berkeley) From Eyesore to Icon: Outsider Art, Racial Politics, and the Watts Towers
 
Sydney Skelton Simon (Stanford University) Harry Bertoia and Postwar American Design Culture
 
Juliet S. Sperling (University of Pennsylvania) Animating Flatness: Seeing Moving Images in American Painting and Mass Visual Culture, 1800-1895
 
Gillian Turner Young (Columbia University) Electric Theater: Joan Jonas and the Emergence of Performance Art in the 1970s