Washington, DC—The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center) announced today its 2023–2024 academic year appointments. Every year, the Center brings distinguished scholars from around the world to its internationally renowned research institution at the National Gallery of Art. The incoming scholars include Nancy J. Troy of Stanford University as Kress-Beinecke Professor, Adriana Zavala of Tufts University as Andrew W. Mellon Professor, and Pamela H. Smith of Columbia University as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor. The 73rd A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts for spring 2024 will be actor, author, playwright, and New York University professor Anna Deavere Smith.

In addition to these appointments, six senior fellows, ten visiting senior fellows, three National Gallery of Art sabbatical fellows, three postdoctoral fellows, seven predoctoral fellows, and 12 Howard University undergraduate interns will be in residence at the Center this year. The Center also announced its fellows in the field, including 12 predoctoral fellows and four predoctoral historians of American art, who were awarded fellowships to travel abroad. 

“From undergraduate interns to senior scholars, this year’s interdisciplinary cohort brilliantly expands what the study of art, architecture, and visual culture can be,” said Steven Nelson, dean of the Center. “Their scholarship breaks new ground, allowing us to understand myriad subjects anew.”

Research topics vary widely, from Soviet architecture, climate science, and the “Other” in ancient Neo-Assyrian art to an investigation on bronze’s materiality as it relates to race in 19th-century America. Center members in residence will benefit from offices in the National Gallery’s East Building 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 this fellowship program and 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 mid-career 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, the Center supports various senior fellowships, visiting senior fellowships, sabbatical fellowships for National Gallery staff, postdoctoral fellowships, predoctoral fellowships, and undergraduate internships.

The Center supports an active program of publications, including the National Gallery’s series Studies in the History of Art and Seminar Papers. Both series are available for purchase at shop.nga.gov. Volumes of Studies in the History of Art 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
Nancy J. Troy
Stanford University

Andrew W. Mellon Professor
Adriana Zavala
Tufts University

Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor
Pamela H. Smith
Columbia University

73rd A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts
Anna Deavere Smith
Writer/Actress

Senior Fellows
Brian D. Goldstein, Swarthmore College
Paul Mellon Senior Fellow
If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond Jr.

Robb Hernández, Fordham University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow                                     
Transplanetary: Speculative Arts of the Americas

Pamela M. Lee, Yale University
William C. Seitz Senior Fellow
The Art of Small War

Walter Simon Melion, Emory University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow
Praying through Prints: Technologies of Affective Piety and Image-Based Devotion in Dutch and Flemish Prayer Books, 1480–1680

Kathryn Blair Moore, University of Connecticut
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow
The Other Space of the Arabesque: Italian Renaissance Art at the Limits of Representation

Alla Vronskaya, Universität Kassel
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow
Environmental Colonization: Architecture, Climate, and Geography in the Cold War Soviet Union

Visiting Senior Fellows
Adeyemi Akande, University of Lagos
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, summer 2023
Dimensionality and Replacement: Photographs as Surrogates in West African Cultures and Religion

Alejandro Anreus, William Paterson University
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, fall/winter 2023
Dictatorships, Exile, and Recovery: Caribbean Artists, 1960–1980; Trujillo, Duvalier, and Castro Dictatorships and the Narrative of 11 Contemporary Artists

Courtney R. Baker, University of California, Riverside
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, fall/winter 2023
Cinematic Slavery and Its Fine Arts Precedents

Angela Cerasuolo, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, fall/winter 2023
“Avvertimenti de’ quali non fa bisogno ragionare”: Pigments and Mixtures in Literary Sources of the 16th Century, between Recipe Books and Art Theory

Mohamed Elshahed, Mexico City
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, summer 2023
A History of Egypt in 100 Objects

Margaret L. Laird, Wilmington, DE
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, fall/winter 2023
Drawing Beasts: Narrativity and the Ancient Roman Imagination

Gregory Sholette, Queens College, City University of New York
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, summer 2023
Backstories of Art and Activism

Petra Trnkova, Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, fall/winter 2023
Copy Relations: The Mechanical Reproduction of Art in the Mid-19th Century

Tomáš Valeš, Masarykova Univerzita
Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellow, summer 2023
Human Bodies, Gender, Race, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Late 18th-Century Vienna

James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, fall/winter 2023
Shell Oil and the Political Confrontation of the Arts

Ailsa Mellon Bruce National Gallery of Art Sabbatical Fellows
James Meyer
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art
What Happened to the Institutional Critique?

Andrea Nelson
Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art
Reading Modern Photobooks

Susan B. Wertheim
Office of Architecture and Engineering, National Gallery of Art
Contemplating Contemplative Spaces: The Power of Abstraction in Modern Architecture

Postdoctoral Fellows
Maria Gabriella Matarazzo, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University
Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellow, 2023–2025
Beyond “Buon Fresco”: Experimenting with Oil in Wall Painting, c. 1500–1700

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

Predoctoral Dissertation Fellows (in Residence)
Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen, Johns Hopkins University
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2022–2024
Untitled: Nasreen Mohamedi, Geeta Kapur, and Abstraction in Internationalist India, 1950–2016

Justin M. Brown, Yale University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2022–2024
Afro-Surinamese Calabash Art in the Era of Slavery and Emancipation

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. 1600–1830

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

Predoctoral Dissertation Fellows (Not in Residence)
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

Chasitie Brown, The University of Texas at Austin
Twelve-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2023–2024
The Dormant Scar: Embodying Blackness in the Queloides Exhibition Series in Cuba, the United States, and Spain (1997–2012)

Rowanne Dean, University of Chicago
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2023–2026
Valuing Virtuosity: Goldsmiths’ Work in Northwestern Europe, c. 1350–1500

Ryan Eisenman, University of Pennsylvania
David E. Finley Fellow, 2023–2026
The Limoges Champlevé Enamel Industry, c. 1180–1280

William Green, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2023–2024
Looking Back/Looking Ahead: Alternative and Antiquated Process Photography in North America, c. 1970

Hannah Kaemmer, Harvard University
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow, 2023–2024
Expertise and Empire: Fortification Building and the English Ordnance Office, 1660–1714

Chaeri Lee, Indiana University
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2023–2025
Āthār: Visualizing Vestiges of Time in 19th-Century Iran

James H. Miller, Princeton University
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2023–2025
Fossils for a Future Time: David Smith and the Sculpting of Traces

Celia Rodríguez Tejuca, Johns Hopkins University
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2023–2025
From the Ground Up: Picturing Scientific Knowledge in the Late 18th-Century Spanish Americas

Julia Silverman, Harvard University
Wyeth Fellow, 2023–2025
Unmaking Tradition: Native Designers and the Representation of Knowledge during the “Indian New Deal”

Wenjie Su, Princeton University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2023–2025
Simulating Time: Cosmological Analogies, Cross-Cultural Similes, and the Transmission of Clockwork Objects between Early Modern Europe and China

Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowships for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad
Kale Doyen, University of Pittsburgh
Julia Hamer-Light, University of Delaware
Emily Kang, University of California, Berkeley
Joseph Mizhakii Zordan, Harvard University

Howard University Undergraduate Interns
Keauna Brantley, 2022–2024
Jada Brooks, 2023–2025
Clay Cauley, 2023–2025
Amaya Charley, 2022–2024
Aletheia Couts, 2023–2025
Dana Goodridge, 2022–2024
Aneesah Lawrence, 2023–2025
Kennedy Martin, 2022–2024
Sacha Reid, 2022–2024
Miles Kenyan Stewart, 2023–2025
Munyang Tengen, 2022–2024
Elroi Yonatan, 2023–2025