Wolfsonian–FIU announces 2010-’11 visiting fellows

The Wolfsonian-FIU Fellowship Program in 2010-’11 will highlight the great range of potential research opportunities offered by the museum’s collection. For the first time, the program will have a thematic focus – research on the links between design and health in the modern era.

Scholars were called upon to consider the ideas of design and health from a broad perspective: “Design” to include a range of practices, such as product design, graphic design, interior design, architecture and urban planning; and “Health” to include such concerns as personal hygiene and fitness, public health, medicine, body image and disability.

“We are very enthusiastic about this shift in the program, as well as what kinds of synergy may result from the research focusing on one area of inquiry,” says Sarah Schleuning, Wolfsonian curator and administrator of the fellowship program. “We’re also pleased that one of the fellows selected by the external review panel, Monica Obniski, was a curatorial intern at the Wolfsonian during the summer of 2004.”

Since its inception in 1995, the Wolfsonian-FIU’s Fellowship Program has hosted more than 70 scholars from colleges, universities and museums in the United States and many foreign countries.

Research conducted during the program has contributed to articles, book chapters, museum exhibitions, university courses and more.

With the help of a panel of distinguished external reviewers, the museum has selected three fellows, each of whom will be in residence for three to four weeks.

This year’s fellows and their projects are:

Elizabeth Lee, assistant professor of art & art history at Dickinson College, will visit The Wolfsonian-FIU to conduct research and contribute to the first chapter of a book-length study titled “Therapeutic Culture: Health and Illness in Turn-of-the-Century American Art,” which examines the relationship between health, disease and illness in late-19th and early-20th century American art. Using the museum’s varied resources related to health, hygiene and fitness, as well as travel and health resorts, Lee will focus her time here on how health was defined in America at the turn of the 20th century. She will explore the definition of health at the time, who was considered healthy, the health practices advocated by doctors, health reformers and physical culture enthusiasts, and how these themes intersect with artistic practice.

Monica Obniski, an art history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois, Chicago, will utilize The Wolfsonian-FIU’s collections to study sunlight’s relationship to modernism, the body and ideas of outdoor living and how it played a critical role in notions of health in early-20th century designed spaces. Her research will concentrate on the intersection between sunlight and architecture and on the physical culture approach to the consumption of sunlight and its effect on health.

Sarah Louise Schrank, an associate professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, will conduct research on nudist suburban home design from 1920-1960. The theme is one component of a more comprehensive project on alternative health practices, body cultism and modern urban living in 20th century America. She has previously spent time at the museum working with the library’s Robert J. Young collection of periodicals and plans to continue that work to include the collection’s holdings of Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine and other library items.

For more information about the fellows for 2010-’11, including their dates in residence at The Wolfsonian-FIU, contact Sarah Schleuning at 305-535-2686 or sarah@thewolf.fiu.edu.