Four Art History PhD Students Receive Provost’s Graduate Research Award from the Graduate College

Maurycy Gottlieb, Self-Portrait in Polish Nobleman's Dress

Four Art History PhD students Julian Adoff, Raquel Flecha, Angela Kepler, and Leili Adibfar won Provost's Graduate Research Awards that will support their preliminary work on their dissertation projects.

Congratulations to Art History PhD students Julian Adoff, Raquel Flecha, Angela Kepler, and Leili Adibfar, who won Provost's Graduate Research Awards from the Graduate College in the Fall cycle of applications. This award will support their preliminary work on their dissertation projects. The Graduate College recently announced the winners of Graduate College research awards here. Art History graduate programs seem to be one of the strongest departments among the award winners.

Julian Adoff's award will allow him to travel to the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary to begin gathering materials for his dissertation on the Jewish/Polish artist Maurycy Gottlieb, the Czech artist Alfons Mucha and the Indian/Hungarian/Jewish artist Amrita Sher-Gil, "artists who have been identified as nationalists, and whose artworks are regarded as foundational to the national artistic canons in their respective countries, but whose artworks expand beyond the notion of the nation."

Raquel Flecha's award will support her interdisciplinary dissertation project entitled "The 1993 Whitney Biennial: Aesthetic Reflections on the Neoliberal Society". Raquel's work is "guided by a central question: in the late capitalist context of America, what aesthetic strategies do the Latinx/a/o artists of the 1993 Biennial employ to problematize questions of identity?" Raquel will visit Whitney Museum’s Frances Mulhall Achilles Library & Archives in New York City, where the artworks are housed, as well as three art galleries and one cultural institute.

Angela Kepler's project is entitled "The Politics of Visibility at the Palais-Royal in Eighteenth-Century Paris." This award will enable Angela to undertake preliminary research in Paris in order  "to analyze modes of production, consumption, and sociopolitical interactions within the Palais-Royal, which [her] work seeks to redefine as a modern public sphere enabled by paper."

Leili Adibfar's dissertation project is entitled "Embodiment and Oil on the Cusp of an Iranian Revolution: The Art of Behjat Sadr from 1955 to 1979.” The Provost's award will help Leili to visit multiple sites that host the materials required for the dissertation work, Paris, London, Rome and Prague. Leili's project investigates Behjat "Sadr’s practice of abstraction in painting as a visual expression of a cosmopolitan artist at the juncture of the local and the global."