2015-16 Andrew W. Mellon Fellows, “Cultures of Conservation”
Vera A. Solovyeva
George Mason UniversityJuly 2015-June 2016
Vera A. Solovyeva is pursuing her Ph.D. at George Mason University. Her research focuses on how indigenous northern peoples preserve and develop their cultures and traditions in a contemporary world that is rapidly changing under the pressure of factors such as globalization and climate change. For example, climate change affects one of the most important components of traditional knowledge—the traditional seasonal calendar by which hunters and fishermen determine when and where they can start hunting, fishing, and collecting food and medicinal plants. How do northern people respond to this impact? What are the cultural values and factors that could help them in adapting to these changing conditions?
Solovyeva is also engaged in the process of recovering lost knowledge, traditions, and rituals by indigenous people through the study of museum collections, such as the Siberian collections assembled during the Jesup North Pacific Expedition and now kept at the American Museum of Natural History. Thus, traditional craftsmen from the Sakha Republic (Russian Federation) came to America in 2012 and 2014 to study the techniques of making different historical artifacts stored in the AMNH. In addition, Native Americans from the Pomo and Kashaya tribes (USA) went to Saint Petersburg (Russia) in 2014 to study their traditional baskets in the Kunstkamera at the Peter the Great Museum. Through initiatives like these, indigenous peoples are not only revitalizing their knowledge but also restoring the links between current and future generations and their ancestors who made these artifacts. Such endeavors are of major importance for their self-identity and continuity, as they consider themselves a nation in the making.
Stephanie Su
University of ChicagoAugust 2015-June 2016
Stephanie Su holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago. Her long-term research goal is to reconstruct a more interconnected, more globalized history of East Asian art by exploring the transmission of ideas, objects, styles and motifs across East Asia and beyond. Her dissertation focuses on the transcultural relationship between China and Japan in the early twentieth century through the study of history painting on Chinese subjects in the mode of French academic art. She argues that China was not simply a passive subject to be appropriated by Japan. Instead, ideas, concepts and images flew multi-directionally between China and Japan, even when their power relationship was imbalanced. At Bard Graduate Center, she will be working on a joint project with the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the use of synthetic dyes in late nineteenth century Japanese woodblock prints and textiles. Bringing together an interdisciplinary approach to art, science and history, this project seeks to renew our understandings of changing artistic expressions and consumer tastes by examining the material substance and cultural meanings of colors along with the ever-expanding global trade network.
Among her publications are: “Recent Trends and Future Directions in Overseas Chinese Art Research,” in Annual Report on Chinese Art Research (Beijing: Research Center for Modern and Contemporary Chinese Documents, forthcoming); “Traduire la peinture d’histoire: Xu Beihong et Confucianisme dans la Chine moderne,” in Un maître et ses maîtres: Xu Beihong et la peinture académique française (exhibition catalogue. Beijing: Xu Beihong Memorial Art Museum, 2014); “The Moon Night: Visualizing the Musical Experience in 1930s China,” in Rui Oliveira Lopes, ed., Face to Face. The Transcendence of the Arts in China and Beyond: Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Art (Global Art Monograph Series. Lisbon: Artistic Studies Research Centre, 2013); “Classicizing Creative Prints: Yamamoto Kanae in France,” in Anne Leonard, ed. Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints (exhibition catalogue. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2012); “Ruins as Sites of Modernity: Yan Wenliang’s Representation of Roman Ruins in 1930,” Modern Art Asia, vol. 5, November 2010 (reprinted in Majella Munro ed., Modern Art Asia, Issues 1-8. Cambridge, UK: Enzo Arts and Publishing Limited, 2012).
2015-16 Research Fellows
Brendan Dooley
University College CorkSeptember and November-December 2015
Brendan Dooley is professor of Renaissance studies at University College Cork. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He works on the histories of culture and knowledge with reference to Europe and especially to Italy and the Mediterranean world. Dr. Dooley has published widely on topics relating to intellectual life, institutions, and patronage structures from 1500-1800. Partly by background, partly by inclination, he is particularly drawn to topics regarding transition, transmission, and translation, in the broadest senses. Hence the direction much of his recent research has taken, in the areas of mediality and communication, within and among physical and mental spaces, between past and present, in love and war. Examples include A Mattress Maker’s Daughter, the Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza (Harvard, 2014) and, as editor, The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Culture (Ashgate, 2010). At Bard Graduate Center, he will continue investigating humanities methodologies applied to material culture in a project entitled “Angelica’s Book: The Power of Reading in a Late Renaissance.”
Haidy Gesimar
University College LondonSeptember-December 2015
Haidy Geismar is reader in anthropology at University College London, where she directs the Digital Anthropology program, part of the Material, Visual and Digital Culture research arm of the department and curates the UCL Ethnography Collections. She received her Ph.D. from University College London. With extensive research experience in museums in the Pacific, Europe, and North America, and with communities in Vanuatu and New Zealand, she has published widely on the museum history of anthropology and photography, material culture studies, intellectual and cultural property rights, indigenous arts movements, and digital museum initiatives. As well as teaching, research, and publishing, Dr. Geismar has curated several international exhibitions, most recently the Guantanamo Public Memory Project exhibition in London, and the exhibition Port Vila Mi Lavem Yu in Honolulu and New York. Her book, Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Malakula since 1914, coauthored with curators in Cambridge and Vanuatu, was awarded the 2012 Collier Prize for Still Photography by the Society for Visual Anthropology. Her most recent book, Treasured Possessions: Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property (Duke, 2013), compares indigenous appropriations of intellectual and cultural property in museum and art worlds in Vanuatu and New Zealand. She is the founder and editor of the popular anthropology weblog, www.materialworldblog.com, and current coeditor of the Journal of Material Culture. At Bard Graduate Center, she will continue investigating her current research project—a comparative study of the nature of digital objects in contexts as varied as Instagram, Maori-made 3D collections, and open source collections management systems.
Susanne Ebbinghaus
Harvard Art MuseumsJanuary-March 2016
Susanne Ebbinghaus is the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art and head of the Division of Asian and Mediterranean Art at the Harvard Art Museums. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral dissertation traces the spread of a specific form of drinking vessel, the rhyton with animal forepart, in the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Dr. Ebbinghaus’s research focuses on the art and archaeology of ancient Greece and the Near East, with special interests in the material culture of feasting and cross-cultural interaction between east and west. At the Harvard Art Museums, she organized Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity (2007), an exhibition that explored the original coloration of ancient sculpture, and worked on the installation of the collections galleries for the museums’ 2014 reopening. She edited Superficial? Approaches to Painted Sculpture, a special issue of Source: Notes in the History of Art (2011), and Ancient Bronzes through a Modern Lens (2014), a collection of essays on the scientific and art historical study of ancient bronzes. She has taught courses in Classics and History of Art, and is engaged in the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis in Turkey. At Bard Graduate Center, Ebbinghaus will carry out research for the exhibition Drinking with Gods, Heroes, and Kings: Animal-Shaped Vessels from the Ancient World, investigating the rich realm of ideas expressed at feasts and the complex cultural exchanges that connected east and west in antiquity.
K.L.H. Wells
University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeJune-August 2016
K.L.H. Wells is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the interconnections between fine and applied arts, and her book manuscript in progress, Transatlantic Tapestries and the Marketing of Modernism, explores the close relationship between modernist painting and French tapestry in the decades following World War II. Wells was a member of the Textile Project at the University of Zurich and the first Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Craft at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her publications include “The ‘merely imitative mood’: British Japonisme and Imperial Mimesis,” forthcoming in Nineteenth Century Studies; “Rockefeller’s Guernica and the Collection of Modern Copies,” in Journal of the History of Collections (2014); “Serpentine Sideboards, Hogarth’s Analysis, and the Beautiful Self,” in Eighteenth Century Studies (Spring 2013); and “Artistes contre Liciers: La Renaissance de la Tapisserie Française,” in Decorum (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Skira Flammarion, 2013). At Bard Graduate Center, Wells will be completing her book manuscript.
2015-16 Visiting Fellows
Tian Chun
Guangzhou Academy of Fine ArtsSeptember–December 2015
Tian Chun is associate professor of art and design history at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He received his PhD from Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. He works on aesthetics and design history, and has published a number of articles and books on these topics. His publications include “The Relationship between Picturesque Idea and Chinese Garden” (Collected Papers of the 18th International Congress of Aesthetics, China Social Science Press, 2014) and Aesthetics of Design (Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, China, 2011). Recently he has been focusing on Chinoiserie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At Bard Graduate Center, Dr. Chun will continue his research on the subject.
Matthew Dennis
University of OregonApril–June 2016
Matthew Dennis is professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. His books include Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in 17th-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); Riot and Revelry in Early America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002); Encyclopedia of Holidays and Celebrations, 3 vols. (editor, New York: Facts of File, 2006); and Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). His essays, both popular and scholarly, have assayed a range of subjects, as material as Plymouth Rock and as ephemeral as dreams and visions, as celebratory as American holidays and festivals and as dire as death and mortal remains. At Bard Graduate Center, he will continue working on his current book project, entitled American Relics and the Politics of Public Memory.
