by Jon Lackman | 28 April 2010 | Awards
Last month, Harvard art historian Joseph Leo Koerner was one of three scholars to receive an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. “Intended to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life, the awards, amounting to as much as $1.5 million each, honor scholars who have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry.” Art historians Michael Fried, T.J. Clark, and Tom Gunning won the award in 2004, 2005, and 2008 respectively.
In other Mellon news, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts (my institution) recently won a Mellon grant. According to the institute’s director, this grant will
support a three- to four-year project to examine the state of the field in art history, archaeology and conservation. The grant of $1,523,000 will enable us to convene a series of panels to examine advanced research in selected areas, asking where those fields are going, what the strengths are in given areas of study, what they require in terms of resources to pursue advanced research, how those resources are best managed, and how learning is best delivered in curriculum and training programs. The project will involve conferences, workshops, and invitations to Visiting Professors, who will act as panel chairs while offering courses at the IFA. There will be three two-year postdoctoral fellowships at the IFA in conjunction with the project, and we will also appoint a Research Activities Coordinator to oversee the management of the panels and to take over the arrangements for research-based activities (seminars, conferences, and lectures). The detailed planning phase is now underway and more information about the program and the fellowships should soon appear on the research pages of our website, so watch that space.
