Fulbright awardees Bert Geyer and Anneliese Hardman featured in UIC Today
Introduction
UIC’s newest Fulbright recipients prepare to embark
https://today.uic.edu/latest-uic-fulbright-grantees-prepare-to-embark/
Bert and Anneliese have shared their full responses to the questionnaire they received from UIC Today, providing more complete information than what made it into the article.
From Bert:
Tell me your name, connection to UIC and what your field of studies/major is.
My name is Bert Geyer and I am a PhD Candidate in the Art History department at UIC.
Where are you headed to and what do you plan to focus on as part of your Fulbright?
Through a Fulbright Research Award, I will spend nine months in the Philippines conducting research for my dissertation with the working title, "The Forester's Sensorium: Perceiving the Forests of US Empire, 1848-1942." While in the Philippines, I will be analyzing the interconnected network and projects of artists, architects, and foresters across the late Spanish and American colonial periods through research in numerous archives and museums and site visits to forests throughout the country.
Why did you decide to pursue a Fulbright?
The Fulbright is a tremendous opportunity for supporting doctoral research and the Philippines Fulbright in particular has an admirable and expansive community of Filipino and American Fulbright scholars as it is the longest continuously running Fulbright program since its commencement in 1948.
What is your personal story that would be enhanced through the Fulbright?
Through and alongside my research, I look forward to increasing my proficiency with Tagalog and the nineteenth century Spanish of archival documents and primary publications as well as building lasting relationships with my colleagues at the Philippine universities with which I will be affiliated, University of the Philippines Los Baños and University of the Philippines Baguio.
What is your future goal/dream after your studies that would be helped by receiving the Fulbright and its work?
The Fulbright will foster two aspirations of mine. The extensive research and immersion of sustained residence in the Philippines will immeasurably enrich the dissertation's empirical scope and my own analytic acumen. Beyond the dissertation, I anticipate the Fulbright experience will be a deep fount from which I may draw for teaching, which I hope to pursue after the doctorate. Through teaching, I aim to cultivate the interests of students towards immersive and multi-lingual humanities scholarship both for the dear knowledge it produces and the personal transformation it yields for how one understands oneself and one's connectedness to the world—something that requires intensive rigor and commitment yet is sadly increasingly devalued.
How do you think UIC will/has helped you achieve your goals?
The Art History department is a fantastic home and I must credit its faculty, including my advisor, Ömür Harmanşah, and my graduate student peers for their contributions and support to my own intellectual development. The Institute for the Humanities, where I was a Resident Graduate Scholar this past year, is a kind and profound environment in which to work. My experience and education at UIC would be all the poorer without the teaching and mentorship I received from coursework with faculty beyond my department in Hispanic and Italian Studies, History, English, and Earth and Environmental Sciences. Finally, our Fulbright Program Advisors here at UIC: Benn Williams, Lindsay Marshall, and Kim Germain, offered sustained support and keen insights over six months as I developed the Fulbright research program and application. I cannot thank them enough.
From Anneliese:
Tell me your name, connection to UIC and what your field of studies/major is.
My name is Anneliese Hardman, and I am a PhD Candidate in the department of Art History studying Southeast Asian art histories. This year, I was named a Fulbright Alternate for the Fulbright Research/Study Award in Cambodia. My dissertation is titled "Ecological Engagements with Contemporary Cambodian Art" and asks the main question of how ecological changes within Cambodia's physical environment impact artistic production. A secondary question is: how are contemporary Cambodian artists responding visually to ecological shifts in their environment due to widespread deforestation, damming, dredging, stripmining, etc?
Where are you headed to and what do you plan to focus on as part of your Fulbright?
To answer these questions, my proposed Fulbright study, titled "Ecological Engagements with Contemporary Cambodian Art," is based in the three cities of Phnom Penh (the capital of Cambodia), Siem Reap, and Battambang. Each of these sites are contemporary art hubs in a country that generally does not support contemporary arts in lieu of traditional Angkor arts. In each of these cities I will interview artists, visit studios, talk with art museum curators, view art in-person, and importantly, conduct site visits to places referenced in the art I study. To grasp how artists are responding, it is crucial to better understand how they are representing place through their art. For example, Vandy Rattana's Bomb Ponds series photographs sites impacted by the Secret Bombings in Cambodia (where 2.75 million tons were dropped between the years of 1965 and 1973 by the US). In his Kampong Prei Kuk image, the bomb pond has been photographed during the dry season which makes the pond look dried out and retaken over by native vegetation. By choosing to capture the site during this season, the artist emphasizes the recovery process of Cambodian landscapes and people who dwell in these landscapes.
Why did you decide to pursue a Fulbright?
I chose to apply for a Fulbright because of how necessary it is that I view artworks and sites visualized in artwork, like Rattana's Kampong Prei Kuk in person. While the internet allows me to see artworks online, small jpegs cannot communicate the scale, texture, materiality, and process of making artwork. This can only be realized when seeing something in person, talking with an artist, and realizing the context from which an artwork was inspired. Fulbright Research and Study Awards allow you to do just this—to create a research and study plan catered to support the unique intricacies of your personal scholarship. Unlike other awards like Boren or Blakemore (Alternate 2026) which require full time research study, Fulbright was created to provide support necessary for full time immersive research. Not many other awards provide help with a long term visa in a country and such flexible funding to conduct such varied methods of research, including interviews, site and studio visits, archive, museum, and library trips, etc.
What is your personal story that would be enhanced through the Fulbright?
During my undergraduate studies as a history and music major at Palm Beach Atlantic University, I studied abroad at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Oxford. These immersive programs made me realize that experiential learning is one of the best ways for me to learn. After graduating, I was a Peace Corps Cambodia Finalist (2019) and ultimately got a job working as a museum assistant at the Cambodia Peace Gallery in Battambang. At the museum, I curated an exhibition about the revitalization of arts in Cambodia following the Khmer Rouge genocide and the ways that contemporary arts in Cambodia is a key trauma recovery mechanism. COVID forced me to come back to the US at which point I pursued my MA in Museum Studies from Florida State U and a second MA in Peace and Conflict Studies from Pannasastra University of Cambodia. Throughout these programs, I continued to think about the amazing work that the artists I got to know in Cambodia are doing and decided to apply for PhD studies. The Cambodian government does not currently support artforms beyond art dedicated to revitalizing "a glorious past" and recording the horrors of the genocide period. I see my scholarship as building on work that expands these limited narratives. I write about artists that are emerging, mid-career, and established who address topics in Cambodia beyond temples and trauma. Artists today are concerned about their rapidly changing environments and cultures—about government corruption, loss of cosmological belief systems, disappearing minority languages, and local knowledge of relating to land through agriculture. These are the topics that my Fulbright project explores further. Through a Fulbright, I am able to elevate these stories of art history and map how what is happening in Cambodia is also relatable to case studies all over the world. I am also able to lean into experiential types of learning that I realized (in undergrad) benefit me most and continue relationships I formed while first working in Cambodia in 2019.
What is your future goal/dream after your studies that would be helped by receiving the Fulbright and its work?
Following PhD studies, I would like to work in museums, teach, and continue academic research. I would like to work in an art museum as a curator of Asian or global modern and contemporary arts and will also apply to teaching positions as an art history/museum studies professor at the college level. I hope that through these positions, I can share the knowledge I have learned about Cambodian and greater Southeast Asian art histories with students and the general public who have never been exposed to this type of art history before. The Fulbright is one of the most prestigious research awards in the US and will help give credibility to my research while applying for jobs. The hard skills of Fulbright research, deep understanding of my field of study, and the relationships I form while in Cambodia are also invaluable for future exhibition content, curriculum development, and research projects.
How do you think UIC will/has helped you achieve your goals?
UIC has been an ideal place for me to pursue my PhD studies because of the program's focus on modern and contemporary global arts alongside ancient and early modern. Faculty in the program have experience teaching about almost all continents and time periods of art history. As a result, students in UIC's art history program span interests across Africa, Polynesia, North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin and South America. Exposure to so many types of art history helps me to see how my project relates, converses, and contributes to art histories around the world. I feel grateful to have such committed mentors, like my advisor, Dr. Catherine Becker, who works tirelessly with me to edit fellowship drafts, tweak dissertation ideas, etc and such collaborative colleagues in art history who sharpen my ideas through reading groups and in (and outside of) class discussions. Beyond UIC's amazing resources like Benn Williams and Lindsay Marshall in the Grants and Fellowships office, being a student in Chicago is invaluable. During my time studying at UIC, I have been able to take classes at UChicago and Northwestern (through CMEP). I have also taken courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, U-Wisconsin Madison, Northern Illinois, U Michigan, and U-Washington Seattle through connections made at UIC. Being in Chicago has also given me chances to contribute to exhibitions like UM's "Angkor Complex" and the National Cambodia Heritage Museum's "Carving Legacies." These experiences, paired with teaching my own course at SAIC, writing exhibition reviews for Chicago-based Bridge Mag, co-organizing symposiums at the Newberry and UIC, and countless other opportunities shape the scholar I am, the opportunities I have access to, and my career decisions moving forward.
End thoughts:
While I have not yet been promoted to a Fulbright Finalist, through scholarship money provided to me through the Ross Edman Fellowship, the Provost Graduate Visiting Scholar Award, UIC's Graduate Student Council Travel Award, and the Southeast Asian Association's Dissertation Workshop, I will move forward with research plans to be in Cambodia and the greater Asia-Pacific region for the Fall 2026 semester conducting dissertation research. My plans generally follow those that I wrote about for my Fulbright with added museum visits in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, and Singapore and presentations scheduled in Malaysia and Pakistan.