ACLS Awards 2025 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the 2025 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellows in American Art. The program, which is made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation, supports promising emerging scholars as they pursue doctoral research on the history of the visual arts in the United States, including all facets of Native American art.

Since 1992, the Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art have supported more than 300 scholars of American art—now some of the nation’s most distinguished college and university faculty, museum curators, and leaders in the cultural sector.

The awards are designed to promote scholarship that advances and expands the field of art history, including research that elevates voices, narratives, and subjects that have been historically underrepresented in the academy. Each fellow receives $42,000 to support one year of research, writing, and fellowship-related travel between July 2025 and May 2027.     

“The Henry Luce Foundation remains wholeheartedly committed to support for doctoral education in American art through the dissertation fellowships administered by our excellent partners at ACLS,” said Teresa Carbone, Program Director for American Art at the Henry Luce Foundation. “The Foundation is pleased, each year, to recognize excellence, new thinking, and new voices in the field, and to provide flexible funding that best serves the plans and needs of these rising  field leaders.”

This year’s projects explore topics such as the use of plastic in art in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of dress and disability in the mid-20th century, and the relationship between the work of Black artisans in the 19th century and abolition.

“Over the last thirty-three years, alumni of this program have helped shape and transform the evolving field of American art history,” said ACLS Program Officer Alison Chang. “This year’s fellows show great potential to impact the field, and we are excited to support them as they chart new scholarly pathways.”

The 2025 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellows in American Art are:

• Max Bowens, Harvard University
  Storing the Self: Art, Data, and Repatriation
• Olivia Comstock, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
  Allen Fannin: Hand Spinning and Weaving, Nitty-Gritty Needs, and “The Black Craftsman Situation”
• Isabel Elson-Enriquez, City University of New York, The Graduate Center
  Becoming Plastic: Synthetic Materiality in US Art 1965-1975
  Ellen Holtzman Fellow
• Jeannette Martinez, University of New Mexico
  Visualities of Belonging: Creating Terruño in Contemporary US Central American Art (1990s–Now)
• Taylor Rose Payer, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
  Crafting Kinship: Abstraction and Native American Women Artists in the Twentieth Century
• Hampton Smith, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Making against Slavery: Artisanry, Capitalism, and the Material History of Abolition in the United States, 1791-1902
• Natalie Wright, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Functional Fashions: Dress and Disability in the United States, 1950-1975