The Smithsonian American Art Museum will host 18 new fellows for the 2018–2019 academic year. The museum’s program grants awards for scholars and students to pursue research at the museum, including senior, predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships. Recipients will be part of the premier residential fellowship in American art—one that celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2020.
“We at the Smithsonian American Art Museum are delighted to welcome this talented group of scholars to the oldest, largest and leading program for the study of American art and culture,” said Stephanie Stebich, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The 2018–2019 museum fellows are:
• Paisid Aramphongphan, Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art, De Montfort University; “Paul Thek: Body Mass Index”
• Renée Ater, senior fellow, University of Maryland, Emerita; “Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past: Race, Memorialization, Public Space and Civic Engagement”
• Sarah Beetham, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan Fellow awarded through the James Smithson Fellowship Program, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; “Monumental Crisis: Accident, Vandalism and the Civil War Citizen Soldier”
• Alison Boyd, Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut; “‘Your Country? How Came It Yours?’: Divergent Artistic and Political Claims for the ‘Soil’ in America in the 1930s–1940s”
• James Brookes, predoctoral fellow, University of Nottingham; “Picturing the Civil War: Visual Culture of the Rank-and-File”
• J.V. Decemvirale, SAAM Predoctoral Fellow in Latinx Art, University of California, Santa Barbara; “Knowing Your Place and Making Do: Radical Art Activism in Black and Latino Los Angeles, 1968 to the Present”
• Clarisse Fava-Piz, Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art, University of Pittsburgh; “Sculpting beyond Borders: George Grey Barnard and Andrew O’Connor during the Age of Rodin”
• Christopher Green, predoctoral fellow, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; “Masked Moderns: Northwest Coast Native Art Beyond Revival”
• Jennifer Greenhill, Joe and Wanda Corn Senior Fellow, University of Southern California; “Commercial Imagination: American Art and the Advertising Picture”
• Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, Rutgers University; “This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975”
• Yinshi Lerman-Tan, Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, Stanford University; “Living Still: John F. Peto and the Artist across Time”
• Talia Shabtay, Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University; “From THINK to Look: Vision and the Mathematical Sciences in the Cybernetic Age, 1946–1961”
• Kimia Shahi, Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, Princeton University; “Margin, Surface, Depth: Picturing the Contours of the Marine in Nineteenth-Century America”
• Sarah-Neel Smith, Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art, Maryland Institute College of Art; “Exhibiting the Middle East: The Lost History of America’s Cultural Exchanges”
• Krista Thompson, George Gurney Senior Fellow, Northwestern University; “Black Light: Tom Lloyd and Refracting Art Histories”
• Phillip Troutman, senior fellow, The George Washington University; “‘Incendiary Pictures’: The Radical Visual Rhetoric of American Abolition in the 1830s”
• Jillian Vaum, Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania; “Between Subject and Type: Representing Free African Americans in Antebellum Portraiture”
• Helena Vilalta, Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art, University College London; “From Information to Incorporation: Embodied Conceptualism in New York, ca. 1970”
Since 1970, the museum has provided more than 680 scholars with financial aid and unparalleled research resources, as well as a world-class network of colleagues. Former fellows now occupy positions in prominent academic and cultural institutions across the United States and in Australia, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East and South America. Fellowship opportunities include the Joe and Wanda Corn Fellowship for scholarship that spans American art and American history; the Douglass Foundation Fellowship for predoctoral research; the Patricia and Phillip Frost Fellowship; the George Gurney Fellowship for the study of American sculpture; the alumni-supported Joshua C. Taylor Fellowship; the Terra Foundation for American Art Fellowships for the cross-cultural study of art of the United States up to 1980; the William H. Truettner Fellowship and the Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship for the study of excellence in all aspects of American art. The museum also hosts fellows supported by the Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program, the Smithsonian Postgraduate/Postdoctoral Fellowships in Conservation of Museum Collections Program and the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s International Placement Scheme. Applications for the 2019 fellowship cycle will open in September. For additional information on how to apply, visit
AmericanArt.si.edu/fellowships, call (202) 633-8353 or email
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posted by Amelia Goerlitz, Chair of Academic Programs, SAAM