The Connoisseurs Circle Fellows

Thanks to the generosity of the Connoisseurs Circle, the Institute is pleased to be able to award several student fellowships each year.

2018-19 Connoisseurs Circle Fellows

Samuel Allen: My first year at the Institute provided an exciting opportunity to begin developing the skills and knowledge necessary for undertaking scholarship focused on the history of photography. One highlight was traveling to Barcelona and Madrid to study a group of pioneering Spanish humanist photographers who were active during the final decades of the Franco regime. In my second year, I look forward to participating in The Museum of Modern Art’s Museum Research Consortium Study Sessions, a forum for research and dialogue between graduate students and the museum’s curators and conservators. This coming year will also feature the publication of two books on which I served as research assistant: Kevin Moore’s Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott and Robert Slifkin’s The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 1945-1975.

Da Hyung Jeong: My fourth year at the Institute was one of significant challenge and growth. Alongside preparations for the qualifying exams, I attended an international conference in Oslo, Norway and delivered a guest lecture in Riga, Latvia. They were opportunities to present the outcomes of a recent research on two important but overlooked aspects of Soviet culture, namely cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the Scandinavian countries and the possibility of postulating a Soviet postmodernism. Engaging with archival materials in view of these research objectives, I arrived at the hypothesis that there might have been a correlation between the embrace of foreign discourses and the gradual rejection of modernist ideals that both signified the regime’s un-sustainability and eventual collapse. In the spring semester, I will continue to work toward conceptualizing Soviet postmodernism, relating it to other late, post- and alternative modernisms that occurred elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc—Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland will be of particular interest.

Emma Kimmel: I am very grateful to the Connoisseurs Circle for making it possible for me to continue my second year of studies in paintings conservation at the Institute. At the Conservation Center I have been learning proper art conservation techniques, and this semester started the treatment and scientific analysis of a 16th-century Italian painting from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation entitled The Adoration of the Shepherds by Francesco Bassano. I am also an editor of the recently launched online student journal Lapis: The Journal of the Institute of Fine Arts. We will publish our first issue in the spring 2019 with articles on art history, architecture, and art conservation submitted by graduate students and early career scholars. Outside of my coursework I have interned with IFA alumna Karen Thomas in her private practice, and currently intern at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in their paintings conservation department to gain more hands-on experience.

Anna Majeski: During the 2018-19 academic year I am completing my second year as a predoctoral fellow in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome. My time in Rome has been devoted to research on my dissertation project, which examines the intersection of models for cosmic and political ordering through the astrological imagery of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Padua. The chronological scope of my dissertation is delimited by two astrological cycles completed in the Palazzo della Ragione (c. 1309-12; c. 1425-35), the site of the civic law courts, but embraces a broader range of visual materials, including monumental fresco cycles, illuminated manuscripts and technical treatises. I am particularly focused on how different representational paradigms reflect the multiplicity of astrological theory and practice, and how these images reflect and shape the shifting socio-political landscape of contemporary Padua. In February 2019 I chaired and presented on a panel at the College Art Association conference, where I discussed an astrological manuscript completed for the Southern Italian court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Other projects include contributing to an online catalogue of the collection at the Villa La Pietra, NYU, Florence. 

Alexis Monroe: The fall of 2018 was my final semester of coursework, during which time I continued my pursuit of two major areas of research: the American Civil War and American Regionalism. The latter yielded a paper on the impact of newspaper distribution on the development of a Midwestern “Gothic” aesthetic in the 1920s, epitomized by the construction of the Tribune Tower skyscraper in Chicago. I also served as a recitation leader under my advisor, Dr. Slifkin, for his undergraduate course on the history of photography. In the spring of 2019, I will be preparing to defend my dissertation proposal, tentatively concerning American landscape painting during the Civil War. I will also give a paper on Dutch landscape painting in Rome in the 17th century at the University of Chicago, and will see the publication of my essay on Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits as a book chapter.