PhD Candidate Zack Martin wins Fulbright Fellowship to Belgium
Zack Martin will spend 9 months in Belgium for his dissertation fieldwork
PhD Candidate Zack Martin won a Fulbright Fellowship to Belgium! Congratulations Zack!
Zack Martin will spend 9 months in Belgium this coming academic year with the prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, doing fieldwork at the AfricaMuseum at Tervuren, Belgium for his project titled “Heritage Building at Tervuren: A Cultural History for the Anthropocene.”
Zack described his project as follows:
"Between 1885 and 1960 Belgium claimed a territory in Central Africa at least eighty times its size. To inform and inspire the public about its investments there, the Belgian state planned a universal exhibition and later erected a museum on royal land at Tervuren, near Brussels, that presented the colony as an economic opportunity. The scientific institution became the public face of the Belgian Congo, and its collecting mission was carried out on an awesome scale. Now called the AfricaMuseum, it holds more than 120,000 ethnographic objects, some of them hailed as artistic masterpieces, as well as millions of natural history specimens. If Belgium’s place in history is to be found, it is at Tervuren. The proposed Fulbright project studies the history of the collection, curation, and exhibition of the natural history artifacts—a first for scholars of Tervuren — as well as those of the ethnographic objects used to furnish the museum’s art histories. Through this research, I aim to better understand why and how the museum elaborated multiple heritages of Central Africa for Belgians. Further, I seek to identify the qualities of those discrete heritages that were produced, intentionally or not, in the matrix of this most particular of museums. The project operates in the service of recognizing entangled legacies that remain obscured today."