Awardees | 2017

Juliette Bessette

Juliette Bessette, PhD à l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, wrote a doctoral thesis on the work of British pop artist John McHale. During her stay at the museum, she studied the influence of McHale’s time at Yale on his artistic production. 

Brett Culbert

Brett Culbert, PhD in American studies, Harvard University, wrote his dissertation on the development of Anglo-American landscape aesthetics in the mid-eighteenth century. His research at the museum explored the emergence of the English landscape tradition in a colonial North American context using plates from English landscape treatises and gardening manuals in the YCBA's collection.

Miranda Elston

Miranda Elston, PhD at UNC Chapel Hill, worked on a dissertation titled “Spatial Interaction: Architectural Representations in Early Tudor England.” She used space theory and digital humanities tools to explore the ways Tudor depictions of architecture translated the experience of the built environment into pictorial forms. At the YCBA, she primarily worked with early sixteenth-century books. 

Jennifer Germann

Jennifer Germann, associate professor of art history at Ithaca College, used material from the museum’s collection to contextualize the remarkable portrait Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (ca. 1785, Scone Palace). Engaging with questions about race, gender, and social rank in British portraiture, her study provided an account of the lives and representation of black women in Georgian Britain by exploring the portrayal of Dido Elizabeth Belle. 

Freya Gowrley

Freya Gowrley, tutor in the history of art & architecture, Edinburgh College of Art, worked on a project entitled “Assembling the Self: Collage and Identity, 1770-1900,” which provided an account of “collage” prior to its use in modernist artistic practices. She studied commonplace books, albums, and scrapbooks in the museum's collection. 

Duncan Robinson

Duncan Robinson, CBE, FSA, was until his retirement in 2012, the Master of Magdalene College and a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He served as director of the Yale Center for British Art from 1981 to 1995, and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, from 1995 to 2007. During his time at the YCBA in April, he revised his 2009 Paul Mellon Lecture, “Pen and Pencil: Writing and Painting in England, 1750-1850” for publication.  

Kerry Sinanan

Kerry Sinanan, senior lecturer in English, University of the West of England, pursued a project entitled “Beauty and the Breast: Representations of Women, Motherhood, and Breast-feeding in British Slavery.” She examined depictions of native, slave, and free women in the British Caribbean during the long eighteenth century. 

Tico Seifert

Tico Seifert, senior curator, Scottish National Gallery, curated the first comprehensive British exhibition of Rembrandt’s art, held at the Scottish national gallery in summer 2018. The exhibition encompassed almost four hundred years of the collecting of Rembrandt’s art in Britain and its reception by British artists and writers. His research at the Yale Center for British Art focused on the British response to Rembrandt in the eighteenth century.

Sonal

Sonal, assistant professor, Kamla Nehru College, India, focused on so-called Company Paintings from eighteenth and early nineteenth-century India. This work formed part of a research project studying the way British Mughal political interaction was expressed in visual culture. 

Rachel Stratton

Rachel Stratton, PhD in history of art, Courtauld Institute of Art, pursued research for her thesis, which explored links between the visual arts, modern science, and politics in mid-century Britain, with a particular focus on the Independent Group. Her work at the museum focused on collage and abstraction in the work of John McHale. 

Joshua Weiner

Joshua Weiner, postdoctoral scholar at the University of Haifa, worked on a project titled “The Government of the Senses: aesthetic detachment from Milton to Hume.” He explored the idea of detached spectatorship in the new aesthetics of the early eighteenth century, using the museum's collections to trace the interplay between theories of aesthetic experience and representations of subjects in literature and art, organizing their habits of perception aesthetically. 

Rosetta Young

Rosetta Young, PhD at UC Berkeley, worked on a project entitled “Illustrative Etiquette: Misbehavior, Charles Dickens’s Characterizations, and the 1830s.” She examined how Dickens constructed his literary characters by drawing from the visual culture around him and how literary character, etiquette, and misbehavior were inscribed as intersecting visual phenomena in the 1830s. 

Tom Young

Tom Young, PhD in history of art and architecture, Cambridge University, undertook thesis research for a project entitled “Autonomy to Assimilation: Art and the Politics of the East India Company, 1813-1858.” While at the museum, he focused on works by European artists working in India. 

 

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