ACLS is pleased to announce that Heidi and Tim King have committed $1.5 million to endow the ACLS H. and T. King Fellowship in Ancient American Art and Culture. The Kings worked with ACLS to launch the fellowship in 2019, which recognizes promising early-career scholars pursuing research on the art and architecture of pre-contact societies in the Americas. Their generous endowment will support scholars working in these fields for decades to come.
The fellowship, which is awarded each year as part of the ACLS Fellowship Program, has supported five emerging scholars thus far, including the newly announced 2024 ACLS King Fellow Catherine H. Popovici. An art historian and Austen-Stokes Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Popovici was selected for her project “Variable Atmospheres: Experiencing the Copán Valley Stelae.”
Based on more than 30 years of experience working with Indigenous art and artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heidi King saw a need for more advanced research to increase understanding and appreciation of the contributions and achievements made by early inhabitants of the Americas. The Kings hope to significantly influence conversations that miscast societies outside Euro-descended traditions as “stone-age cultures,” which has traditionally been driven by Eurocentric thinking. This objective resonates with many of the ACLS King Fellows and their research topics, which cover a diverse range of cultures and geographic areas.
“I was drawn to the ACLS H. and T. King Fellowship in Ancient American Art and Culture because of its special dedication to supporting early-career scholars working to forward our understanding of the art and culture of the Ancient Americas,” said Allison Caplan, 2022 ACLS King Fellow and Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. “These goals aligned well with my own project, which focuses on the art of the Aztec Empire in a way that foregrounds Indigenous voices, by using sources written in the Nahuatl language that provide insight into Nahua aesthetics and understandings of the process of making art.”
These goals aligned well with my own project, which focuses on the art of the Aztec Empire in a way that foregrounds Indigenous voices, by using sources written in the Nahuatl language that provide insight into Nahua aesthetics and understandings of the process of making art.
Photo by Patrycja Przadka
Franco D. Rossi, 2021 ACLS King Fellow and Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used his fellowship to continue his research on an ancient school at the Maya archaeological site of Xultun in Guatemala.
“By putting material culture and art history in dialogue with anthropological theory, my work examines how ancient schools were intimately involved in the crafting and transmission of specialized expertise across time,” Rossi explained. “After over twenty years of data collection in Guatemala, our project has assembled a great deal of information about the intricate political ecologies of education and statecraft in this milieu, and I am delighted to have an opportunity to share this work more broadly with many other communities and thinkers through the planned book manuscript.”
Currently in her fellowship year, Stephanie M. Strauss F’23 has delved into her interdisciplinary project, which draws on anthropology, art history, and linguistics. Her research explores the invention, display, and design of hieroglyphic texts and narrative art in early Mesoamerica, a project that has never been tackled by a single Mesoamericanist in one cohesive manuscript.
The ACLS H. and T. King Fellowship is the only award that could have given me the time needed to complete this fine-grained research and to organize my findings into a well-drafted book manuscript. Stephanie M. Strauss F’23
“The ACLS H. and T. King Fellowship is the only award that could have given me the time needed to complete this fine-grained research and to organize my findings into a well-drafted book manuscript,” said Strauss. “It preserved my time and focused my attention at a critical point in my scholarly career, as I sought to bring my first postdoctoral project from conceptualization to concretization.”
As part of the ACLS Fellowship Program, the ACLS H. and T. King Fellowship in Ancient American Art and Culture comes with a stipend of $30,000 to $60,000 for six to twelve months of research and writing, as well as additional funds for scholars who do not hold tenure track appointments. Applications will open in July 2024. Scholars who are pursuing research on the art and architecture of pre-contact societies in the Americas, as well as the anthropology, archaeology, epigraphy, and historical accounts related to their visual culture, are encouraged to apply.
