ACLS Announces 2024 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellows in American Art
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the 2024 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellows in American Art. This year, seven exceptional doctoral candidates have been recognized for their promising research in object- and image-based American art history. The program is made possible by the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation.
Since 1992, the Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art Program has supported more than 300 historians of American art in researching and writing dissertations that advance scholarship on the history of the visual arts of the United States, including all facets of Native American art. The program supports emerging scholars with a particular focus on elevating voices, perspectives, and subjects that have been historically underrepresented in the academy. The 2024 fellows join previous recipients who have emerged as some of the nation’s most distinguished college and university faculty, museum curators, and leaders in the cultural sector.
“Through our continued partnership with the Luce Foundation, ACLS is proud to support the exciting work of these emerging scholars of American art.” said ACLS Program Officer Alison Chang. “Their work is poised to broaden and shift the narrative of American art by highlighting the untold stories of creators throughout our history.”
This year’s awarded projects include a study of memorialization and migration among Chinese Americans in California through expressions of cultural heritage in architecture; an examination of colonial-era architecture and art associated with grief and collective mourning among African, Indigenous, and European peoples; and research on networks of queer Chicanx sociability and desire in Los Angeles between 1985 and 2020, as captured through portraiture, photography, and archival work.
Each fellow will receive $42,000 to support one year of research and writing as well as fellowship-related travel between July 2024 and May 2026. The 2024 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellows in American Art are:
- Elise Armani, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Making Rhythms Out of Barriers: Infrastructural Interventions by Migrant Artists on the Lower East Side (1975-1989) - Elizabeth Fair, University of California, Berkeley
The Walls Speak: Migration and Memory in Chinese American Architecture and Ornament - Alex Fialho, Yale University
Apertures onto AIDS: African American Photography and the Art History of the Storage Unit
Ellen Holtzman Fellow - Kéla Jackson, Harvard University
UnBecoming: The Poetics of Rupture in Visions of Black Girlhood - Li Machado, Temple University
Intricately Woven: Networks of Desire in Queer Chicanx L.A., 1985-2020 - Ashley Williams, Columbia University
Unfree Artists on the Borders of US Empire, 1850-1930 - Joseph Zordan, Harvard University
Tangible Sorrows: The Materiality and Heritage of Grief in Colonial New York, 1688-1764