Amy P. Goldman Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies
The University of Delaware Library, in Newark, Delaware, and the Delaware Art Museum are pleased to offer a joint Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite studies, funded by the Amy P. Goldman Foundation. This one-month Fellowship, awarded annually, is intended for scholars conducting significant research in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, associates, and followers. Research of a wider scope, which considers the Pre-Raphaelite movement and related topics in relation to Victorian art and literature, and cultural or social history, will also be considered. Projects which provide new information or interpretation—dealing with unrecognized figures, women writers and artists, print culture, iconography, illustration, catalogues of artists’ works, or studies of specific objects—are particularly encouraged, as are those which take into account transatlantic relations between Britain and the United States. Applicants whose research specifically utilizes holdings of the University of Delaware Library, the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Helen Farr Sloan Library and Archives are preferred.
Receiving the Fellowship
The recipient will be expected to be in residence and to make use of the resources of both the Delaware Art Museum and the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. The recipient may also take advantage of these institutions’ proximity to other collections, such as the Winterthur Museum and Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Library, and the Bryn Mawr College Library. Each recipient is expected to participate in an informal colloquium on their research subject during the course of Fellowship residence.
A stipend of $3,000 is available for the one-month Fellowship. Housing will be provided. Personal transportation is recommended (but not mandatory) in order to fully utilize the resources of both institutions.
The Fellowship is intended for those who are working toward or hold a Ph.D., or can demonstrate equivalent professional or academic experience. Applications from Ph.D.-track graduate students, independent scholars and museum professionals are welcome. By arrangement with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, scholars may apply to each institution for awards in the same year; every effort will be made to offer consecutive dates.
Fellows
Michelle Reynolds (2023) PhD Candidate, University of Exeter. Reynolds’s dissertation is on women illustrators working in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Britain and their relationship to the New Woman feminist ideal and cultural icon. Through Reynolds’ examination of illustrations, drawings, and watercolors by original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members, the fellowship will support a chapter that considers how women illustrators in the early twentieth century used iconography from these original works in their own representations of women, particularly “emancipated” women.
Lucy Hartley (2022) Professor of English, University of Michigan. Hartley will use the Fellowship for research towards the completion of a book on the Whitechapel Fine Art Loan Exhibitions. The Whitechapel Gallery (1901-) is well-known for its exhibitions of contemporary art and its art education programs for the local community. Less well-known is its origin in an annual art exhibition, established by Rev. Samuel and Henrietta Barnett to provide education the poor and reduce class divisions between East and West London. The book will chart the history of the Exhibitions, reconstructing the material experience of what were primarily displays of Pre-Raphaelite art.
Victoria Hepburn (2021) PhD Candidate, Department of the History of Art, Yale University. The fellowship will support Hepburn’s research for her dissertation on the painter, poet, and art-educator William Bell Scott. Identifying ideas of progress to be the driving force of his work, Hepburn’s project seeks to locate Scott as an important figure in British art with a critical, self-reflexive positionality. In its eclecticism, Scott’s oeuvre mirrors the manifold notions of progress in Victorian Britain and reflects his own ambivalence about its shape and character. Scott’s works attest, nonetheless, to a staunch belief in progress as constructive, a position that set him apart from many illustrious members of his circle, including John Ruskin and William Morris, who saw much in their century to suggest degeneration and crisis rather than positive development.
Nat Reeve (2020) PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their thesis focuses on the art and poetry of Elizabeth Siddal, exploring her corpus’s complicated relationship with her literary and artistic predecessors, and with the contemporaries who shared her post-Romantic vantage point. The Fellowship will support a chapter considering Siddal’s work alongside that of Barbara Bodichon and her artistic ‘sisterhood’, investigating the artists’ disparate approaches to the unstable cultural moment in which they operated.
Tara Contractor (2019) PhD candidate, Yale University, History of Art Department. Her dissertation topic, “British Gilt: Gold in painting 1790-1914 investigates gold as a defining material of the nineteenth century; a material through which artists explored the economics of empire, and their place within new, global art histories. Her Fellowship research will focus on a chapter of her dissertation examining Edward Burne-Jones’s gilt gesso panels from the 1870s and 80s.
Lindsay Wells (2018) PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation explores the correlation between glasshouse architecture, the nineteenth-century houseplant industry, and botanical imagery in Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic art. The Fellowship will support a dissertation chapter investigating the relationship between Victorian houseplant horticulture and the elaborate botanical imagery in paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones.
Melissa Buron (2017) Associate Curator of European Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Fellowship overview: The Fellowship will support Buron’s research for the catalogue that will accompany a major loan exhibition organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, scheduled for summer2018 at the Legion of Honor: Mastering the Masters: Pre-Raphaelites and Their Sources of Inspiration (working title). Mastering the Masters is the first major international exhibition to assemble works of art created by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the Early Italian and Early Netherlandish art pre-dating the High Renaissance painter Raphael that inspired them.
Heather Bozant Witcher (2016) PhD candidate, English Department, Saint Louis University. (Title of Fellowship: The Ideal Collaborative Process of the Pre-Raphaelites)
Fellowship overview: The project looks specifically at the collaboration between individuals such as Mary and Percy Shelley, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (together known under the pseudonym Michael Field); and within the aesthetic press movement: Kelmscott Press, Vale Press, and Hogarth Press, with the supposition that collaboration becomes a means of artistic construction and a lived experience of communal relations.
Nancy Rose Marshall (2015) Professor of Art History, University of Wisconsin – Madison. (Title of Fellowship: Dante Gabriel Rossetti monograph)
Fellowship overview: Research towards completion of a monograph on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a commissioned project with Phaidon Press. Unlike many studies that examine Rossetti in isolation from mainstream Victorian culture, this book places him in specific social–historical contexts. Marshall contends Rossetti was asking the same philosophical questions as many of the most prominent thinkers of his day concerning the definitions of love, passion, flesh, matter and the existence of the soul.
Natasha Moore (2014) Most recently Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney, Australia. (Title of Fellowship: The Literary Life and Times of William Allingham)
Fellowship Overview: Research for her biography, The Literary Life and Times of William Allingham. Nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish poet and man of letters closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. Allingham was a diarist, correspondent, critic, magazine editor, intimate friend to such eminent Victorians as Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle, and husband to illustrator and water-colorist Helen.
Laura Kilbride (2013) PhD candidate, St. John’s College, Cambridge University, English Faculty (Title of Fellowship: “The Pre-Raphaelite School of Poetry”)
Fellowship overview: In preparation for a Thesis on “Algernon Swinburne’s Style,” Ms. Kilbride’s work aims to resurrect Swinburne’s contribution, focusing on the relation between archaism and innovation in the work of Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She will integrate Swinburne’s work into the discussion of pre-Raphaelite literature in an effort to expand the definition of “pre-Raphaelite poetry.”
Kristin Mahoney (2012) Assistant Professor of English, Western Washington University ( Title of Fellowship: “Old Guard/Avant-Garde: The Politics of Post-Victorian Aestheticism”)
Fellowship Overview: Research for a chapter in a forthcoming book investigating the persistence of late-Victorian aestheticism in the early 20th-century, with a focus on figures such as Beerbohm who defiantly foregrounded their connections to the previous century in order to signal their dissatisfaction with e escalating militarism and aggression of the period.
Karen Yuen (2010) Independent Scholar, Vancouver, Canada ( Title of Fellowship: “The Music of Dante Gabriel Rossetti”)
Fellowship Overview: Research towards a book project about the enigmatic relationship between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and music. The premise is that Rossetti not only thought deeply about music, but also saw music as intimately bound to his masculine identity – an identity that was often misunderstood by his critics.
Thad Logan (2009) Department of English, Rice University ( Title of Fellowship: “Rossetti’s Things”)
Fellowship Overview: A study of material objects, research into the life and work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and investigations into the connections among various personalities and artifacts associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle. This research will be published in a forthcoming book on the subject.
Dr. Colin Cruise (2008) Research Lecturer, The School of Art, University of Aberystwyth, Wales (Title of Fellowship: “Pre-Raphaelite Drawing: Theories, Practices and Contexts”)
Fellowship Overview: Research towards an exhibition catalogue for an exhibition, Drawing Conclusions: Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Designs and Watercolours, organized by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England (2010), and guest curated by Dr. Cruise. The exhibition is based on the premise that the Pre-Raphaelites’ drawing style was intimately connected to their identity as artists and enabled them to develop their pictorial ideas and communicate their beliefs.
About the Delaware Art Museum
Founded in 1912, the Delaware Art Museum is home to the largest and most important collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art in the United States. Assembled largely by the Wilmington industrialist, Samuel Bancroft, Jr., at the turn of the century (with significant subsequent additions), the collection includes paintings and drawings by all the major and minor Pre-Raphaelite artists, as well as decorative arts, prints, photographs, manuscripts, and rare books. The Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, with a reference collection of 30,000 volumes, holds Samuel Bancroft’s papers and correspondence, a rich source for the history of collecting and provenance which also contains significant manuscript material by and about the Rossettis.
The Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives at the Delaware Art Museum houses the Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Manuscript Collection.
About the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press:
The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press has broadly based and comprehensive collections—books, periodicals, electronic resources, microforms, government publications, databases, maps, manuscripts, media, and access to information via the Internet—which provide a major academic resource for the study of literature and art. Many printed and manuscript items related to the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates are in the Special Collections Department, including major archives relating to the Victorian artist and writer, George Adolphus Storey, and to the bibliographer and forger, Thomas J. Wise. For more information see, https://library.udel.edu/special. The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, associated with the Special Collections Department, focuses on British literature and art of the period 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and on the writers and illustrators of the 1890s. Its rich holdings comprise 5,000 first and other editions (including many signed and association copies), manuscripts, letters, works on paper (including drawings by Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), and ephemera. For more information see https://library.udel.edu/special/collections/mark-samuels-lasner-collection
To Apply
Send a completed electronic application form, together with a description of your research proposal (maximum 1 page) and a curriculum vitae or resume (maximum 2 pages) to the Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship Committee at fellowships@delart.org. Letters of support from two scholars or other professionals familiar with you and your work are also required. These materials should also be sent via email to: fellowships@delart.org
Important Dates
The deadline to apply for the 2023 Fellowship is November 1, 2023. Notification of the successful applicant will be announced by December 1, 2023. The chosen candidate will then be asked to provide a date for assuming the Fellowship by January 1, 2024.
If you have any questions or would like to request more information, please contact:
Sophie Lynford
Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship Committee
E-mail: fellowships@delart.org