Washington, DC—The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center), an internationally renowned research institution that brings distinguished scholars from around the world to the National Gallery of Art, has announced its 2022–2023 academic year appointments. They include H. Perry Chapman of the University of Delaware (emerita) as Kress-Beinecke Professor, Adriana Zavala of Tufts University as Andrew W. Mellon Professor, and Gail Feigenbaum as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor. Stephen D. Houston of Brown University will deliver the 72nd A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in spring 2023.

In addition to this list of appointees, eight senior fellows and nine visiting senior fellows have been appointed to the Center, along with two National Gallery of Art sabbatical fellows, two postdoctoral fellows, six predoctoral fellows and an additional predoctoral guest scholar in residence, 12 predoctoral fellows not in residence, four predoctoral historians of American art who were awarded fellowships to travel abroad, and our inaugural class of six Howard University Undergraduate Interns.

“One of our largest classes on record, this year’s members represent the future of art history scholarship,” said Steven Nelson, dean of the Center. “Their research will further our collective understanding of artistic histories that have been traditionally underexplored.”

Research topics vary widely, from the effect of migrants on American architecture to the roles of gender in contemporary Native American art. Center members in residence will benefit from offices in the National Gallery’s East Building Study Center and the resources of the National Gallery of Art Library.

About the Center

Since its inception in 1979, the Center has promoted the study of the history, theory, and criticism of art, architecture, and urbanism through the formation of a community of scholars. A variety of private sources support the program of fellowships, and the appointments are ratified by the National Gallery's Board of Trustees. In selecting its members, the Center seeks a diverse pool of scholars in the visual arts.

The Center currently supports the Kress-Beinecke Professor, a one-year appointment of a distinguished scholar; the Andrew W. Mellon Professor, a two-year appointment of a midcareer scholar; and the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, a three- to six-month appointment of a scholar who advances research on subjects associated with the National Gallery’s permanent collection. In addition to various senior fellowships, visiting senior fellowships, postdoctoral fellowships, and predoctoral fellowships, the Center launched the Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellowship to support scholars researching historically marginalized areas of art-historical study in 2020. A board of advisors, composed of seven or eight art historians appointed to rotating terms, serves as a selection committee to review all fellowship applications.

In 1949 the National Gallery commenced the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts to bring the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship in the fine arts. The program, now under the Center’s auspices, is named for Andrew W. Mellon, the National Gallery’s founder, who gave the nation his art collection and funds to build the West Building, which opened to the public in 1941.

The Center publishes its symposia proceedings as the National Gallery’s series Studies in the History of Art Symposium Papers, as well as Seminar Papers. Both series are available for purchase on shop.nga.gov. Volumes of Studies in the History of Art Symposium Papers published more than five years ago can be accessed and downloaded on JSTOR. Center, an annual report published each fall, summarizes the research and activities that took place during the preceding academic year. Its full archive is available for free on the National Gallery website.

Full List of Appointees

Kress-Beinecke Professor
H. Perry Chapman
University of Delaware (emerita)

Andrew W. Mellon Professor
Adriana Zavala
Tufts University

Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor
Gail Feigenbaum
San Diego, CA

72nd A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts
Stephen D. Houston
Brown University

Senior Fellows

Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State University
Paul Mellon Senior Fellow, fall 2022
Liquid Blackness in Contemporary Visual Arts: Black Study as Aesthetic Practice

Sarah L. Lopez, University of Pennsylvania
Paul Mellon Senior Fellow, spring 2023
Architectural History Is Migrant History: Construction Labor and Cantera Stone in Mexico and the United States

Megan R. Luke, University of Southern California
William C. Seitz Senior Fellow
Sculpture in an Age of Mass Reproduction

Angela Ho, George Mason University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow
Defining Self and Other: The Dutch East India Company’s Encounters with Chinese Culture, 1602–1740

Rune Nyord, Emory University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow
Nocturnal Propensities: Mortuary Religion and Ontology in the Ancient Egyptian Middle Kingdom

Morten Steen Hansen, University of Washington
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, fall 2022
Idol-Phobia in the Spanish Empire: Translating the Sacred at the Escorial

Marius B. Hauknes, University of Notre Dame
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow
The Medieval Image of Chaos as the Image of the Other

Christopher Lakey, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, spring 2023
The Materials of Anachronism: Gold Ground Painting During the Long Middle Ages (1200–1600)

Visiting Senior Fellows

James M. Córdova, University of Colorado Boulder
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow, winter 2023
Sacralizing Conquest: The Spanish-Aztec War in Religious Art

Anastasia Dakouri-Hild, University of Virginia
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, fall 2022
The World In Between: Egypt, Wawat, Kush and Meroe in Africa

Al-An deSouza, University of California, Berkeley
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, summer 2022
Disturbances in the Force: Re-Imagining America through Its Art Histories

Ann C. Huppert, University of Washington
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow, fall 2022
Building Knowledge: The Culture of Construction in 16th-Century Rome

Kiki Karoglou, New York, NY
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow, fall 2022
MANIA: Narratives of Madness in Classical Art

Michele Lamprakos, University of Maryland, College Park
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, fall 2022
Memento Mauri: The Afterlife of the Great Mosque of Cordoba

Carol McMichael Reese, Tulane University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow, summer 2022
Race, Housing, and Community Design in the Company Towns of the US Canal Zones, 1920–1960

Alex Dika Seggerman, Rutgers University
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, summer 2022
Art Histories of Antebellum American Islam

Heather Wolfe, Folger Shakespeare Library
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, fall 2022
Paper Matters: The Socio-Materiality of Early Modern Paper

Ailsa Mellon Bruce National Gallery of Art Sabbatical Fellows

Danielle Hahn, National Gallery of Art, Department of Music Programs
We Gather Together: The Role of Music Festivals in Healing and Rebuilding Communities Following Periods of War, Pandemic, Famine, Displacement, and Other Epic Disasters

Paige Rozanski, National Gallery of Art, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art
USCO: A Meditation on Technology and Mysticism and the Creation of a Psychedelic Aesthetic

Postdoctoral Fellows

Nisa Ari, University of Houston
Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellow, 2021–2023
Cultural Mandates, Artistic Missions, and “The Welfare of Palestine,” 1876–1948

Benjamin O. Murphy, University of Oregon
A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022–2024
Second-Order Images: Reflexive Strategies in Early Latin American Video Art

Guest Scholar

Kendra Greendeer, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Paul Mellon Guest Predoctoral Fellow, 2022–2023
Rematriating Indigeneity in Contemporary Native American Arts

Predoctoral Dissertation Fellows (in Residence)

Davida Fernández-Barkan, Harvard University
David E. Finley Fellow, 2020–2023
Mural Diplomacy: Mexico, the United States, and France at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris

Rheagan Eric Martin, University of Michigan
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2021–2023
Printed, Painted, and Illuminated: The Expanding Visual Culture of Venetian Printed Books (1469–1517)

Anthony J. Meyer, University of California, Los Angeles
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2021–2023
The Givers of Things: Nahua Religious Leaders and the Art of Making Gifts in the Mexica and Early Modern Worlds

Cleo Nisse, Columbia University
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2020–2023
Unraveling Canvas: Textile Supports and Venetian Painting from Bellini to Tintoretto

Delphine Sims, University of California, Berkeley
Wyeth Fellow, 2021–2023
(Re)surfacing Black Presence: Photography, Black Women’s Bodies, and Geographies

Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, University of Chicago
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2021–2023
Vera Molnár’s Programmed Abstraction: Computer Graphics and Geometric Abstract Art in Postwar Europe

Predoctoral Dissertation Fellows (Not in Residence)

Meghaa Ballakrishnen, Johns Hopkins University
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2022–2024
Untitled: Nasreen Mohamedi, Geeta Kapur, and the Subject of Abstraction in India, 1950–2000

David P. Bardeen, University of California, Los Angeles
David E. Finley Fellow, 2022–2025
Arboreal Formations: The Dynamics of Wood in Italian Intarsia and Painting, 1450–1525

Robyn A. Barrow, University of Pennsylvania
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2022–2025
Tracking North: Art, Ecology, and Exchange in the Medieval Nordic World

Barbora Bartunkova, Yale University
Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2022–2023
Sites of Resistance: Antifascism and the Czechoslovak Avant-Garde

Justin M. Brown, Yale University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2022–2024
Wind in the Cotton Tree: Afro-Surinamese Art and Ritual during the Period of Slavery

Kirsten J. Burke, Harvard University
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow, 2022–2023
The Art of Writing in Renaissance Germany: Johann Neudörffer’s Calligraphic Revolution

Christopher Daly, Johns Hopkins University
David E. Finley Fellow, 2021–2024
Painting in Lucca in the Late 15th Century: A Problem in Artistic Geography

Erin Dickey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2022–2024
“Bad Information”: Networks, Knowledges, and Feminist Art in the 1980s

Bianca Hand, Johns Hopkins University
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2022–2024
What Is Assyria without the Other: The Subversive Role of Alterity in the Reliefs and Architecture of Sargon II’s Royal Palace at Khorsabad

Aleksander Musiał, Princeton University
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2021–2024
Immersion: Classical Reception and Eastern European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, c. 1680–1830

Catherine L. Nuckols-Wilde, Tulane University
Twelve-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2022–2023
Unfolding the Sign: Iconography and Figuration in Maya Full-Figure Inscriptions

Kelvin Parnell Jr., University of Virginia
Wyeth Fellow, 2022–2024
Casting Bronze, Recasting Race: American Sculpture and the Bronze Economy (1840–1890)

Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowships for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad

Alexandra Artamonova, Northwestern University

Graham Feyl, University of California, Santa Barbara

Janina Lopez, University of Pittsburgh

Brandee Marlese Newkirk, Duke University

Howard University Undergraduate Interns

Keauna Brantley, 2022–2024

Amaya Charley, 2022–2024 

Dana Goodridge, 2022–2024 

Kennedy Martin, 2022–2024 

Sacha Reid, 2022–2024

Munyang Tengen, 2022–2024