Wolfsonian-FIU welcomes 2011-’12 Visiting Fellows

The Wolfsonian-FIU’s Fellowship Program in 2011-’12 will highlight the great range of potential research opportunities offered by the museum’s collection beginning next winter through next summer.

With the help of a panel of distinguished external reviewers, The Wolfsonian-FIU has selected three fellows, each of whom will spend almost a month at the time in residence at the Miami Beach museum.

Since its inception in 1995, the fellowship program has hosted more than 70 scholars from colleges, universities and museums in the United States and overseas. Research conducted during the program has contributed to articles, book chapters, museum exhibitions, university courses and more.

“Our visiting fellows always provide valuable insights into our collection,” said Marianne Lamonaca, the museum’s associate director of Curatorial Affairs and Education. “I am very enthusiastic about these research projects because each in its own way will address how design is shaped by and is a reflection of the context in which it is created – a concept that is central to our mission at The Wolfsonian-FIU.”

This year’s fellows and their projects are:

• Stephen Duncombe (Associate Professor, Gallatin School at New York University), who will utilize The Wolfsonian-FIU’s collections to research how the media and cultural activities of the Roosevelt administration during the New Deal fit together as a system of persuasion. Duncombe will explore how New Deal propaganda strove to recast the role of government, re-imagine who and what an American citizen was, and re-envision America’s history and future.
• Elizabeth Heath (Assistant Collegiate Professor and Harper Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago), who will focus on visual representations of the French colonies, colonial subjects and colonial products offered by French travel advertisements and forms of popular entertainment, particularly World’s fairs and expositions. Heath’s project will trace the colonial origins of modern French economic structures, cultural habits and social forms, ultimately suggesting that contemporary conceptions of “Frenchness” are deeply indebted to past relations with colonial territories, producers and products.
• Margaret Dikovitskaya (Lecturer, College of Art and Design, Toronto, Canada, who will zero in on the attitudes in Imperial Russia toward non-Russian peoples of the empire. Dikovitskaya will look at an evolution of racist “natural” attitudes toward inorodtsy, or “peoples of different stock,” and the knowledge of the colonized postulated by popular visual culture that served as a hotbed for the growing nationalism in the metropole.

Each Visiting Fellow will conduct his or her work in January, June and May of 2012, respectively.

For more information about the Wolfsonian’s 2011-’12 Visiting Fellows, contact Marianne Lamonaca at 305-535-2627.