SEPTEMBER 2004

RESEARCH FELLOWS STUDY COLLECTION

"During the wet and hot Miami summer, I enjoyed a most fertile and productive fellowship," reports Marjan Groot, a Wolfsonian research fellow during 2003-04. Ms. Groot, a lecturer in Decorative Arts and Design at Leiden University in The Netherlands, spent July 2003 at The Wolfsonian, researching animal iconography in Dutch Art Nouveau. The Wolfsonian's collection provided "a lot of good artifacts and items...The extensive library and wonderful ephemera collection on Dutch Art Nouveau and graphic arts were extremely helpful," she says. "I've already used results of my research for an essay for the exhibition Symbolism in Dutch Art and Decorative Art, 1890-1930, on view in Holland last summer."

Groot was one of five scholars awarded fellowships for 2003-04. Each scholar spent approximately four weeks at the museum, conducting research and working with museum staff. The fellowship program, established in 1993, "provides outstanding opportunities not only for the fellows, but for the museum," notes Jon Mogul, fellowship coordinator and curatorial research associate. "The fellowship grants researchers access to The Wolfsonian's collection, which in most cases allows them to do research they can't do anywhere else in the U.S. At the same time, we learn an immense amount about the collection and our time period from the fellows."

Other 2003-04 fellows were: Maria Elena Versari, a doctoral candidate in art history at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Ms. Versari researched the relationship between Italy's Fascist regime and Futurist artists. Susan R. Henderson, an associate professor of architecture at Syracuse University, studied works produced by early-twentieth-century design reformers in the northern German artists' colonies of Hagen and Worpswede. Edward Wolner, an associate professor of architecture at Ball State University, investigated the relationship between images of skyscrapers and the American "romance" with modernization during the 1920s and 1930s. Graham Barnfield, a lecturer in cultural and innovation studies at the University of East London, researched ways in which New Deal cultural policies found expression in New Deal artistic production.

In June, The Wolfsonian announced its selection of six visiting fellows for 2004-05. The 2004-05 fellows are: Jeffrey Schnapp, a professor of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory. He will explore the role of crowds in modern visual culture for an exhibition entitled Revolutionary Tides. Virginia Gardner Troy, an assistant professor of Fine Arts at Berry College, will investigate issues involving the design, production, marketing, and consumption of modernist textiles in Europe and America. Helen Dudley, a doctoral candidate in Art History at Emory University, will conduct research for her dissertation, which analyzes the art of Strapaese, an artistic movement promoting Tuscan regional identity during the period of Fascist rule in Italy. Willard Bohn, a distinguished professor of Foreign Languages at Illinois State University, will study poetry produced by the Italian Futurist movement, called "aeropoetry." Joshua Arthurs, a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Chicago, will conduct research related to his dissertation, "Roman Modernities: Archaeology and Romanità in Italy, 1911-1961." Christina Cogdell, an assistant professor of American Art at the College of Santa Fe, will examine texts, photographs, drawings, and other materials that reveal American attitudes about health, hygiene, and the aesthetics of the evolving human body as presented at U.S. world's fairs of the 1930s.

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