Washington, DC—The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center), the National Gallery’s world-renowned research institute, announced today its fellows for the 2026–2027 academic year. Over 30 fellows will conduct research that spans continents, centuries, and disciplines. Their topics include visualizing the apocalypse in medieval Europe, the material culture of death and dying in premodern India, and painted soundscapes in Korean Buddhist art, among many others.

Liza S. Kirwin, deputy director emerita of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, will be the Kress-Beinecke Professor, researching 19th-century Hudson River School painter Jervis McEntee. Kathleen Christian, this year’s Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, will bring her understanding of the Renaissance reception of antiquity to the National Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition Broken: The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture. Professor and curator Erica Moiah James begins her two-year appointment as Andrew W. Mellon Professor. 

“I am honored to usher in our 47th fellowship year—and my first as dean—with such an exceptional cohort of scholars whose research reflects the depth and global reach of the visual arts fields today,” said C. D. Dickerson III, dean of the Center.

Beyond the National Gallery’s campus, 13 predoctoral fellows will conduct research in the field. In addition to this list, the Center will announce over a dozen visiting senior fellowships with two-month-long residencies throughout the year.

Center fellows in residence have offices in the National Gallery’s East Building. Throughout the academic year, they have opportunities to share their research and are encouraged to attend lectures, programs, tours, and gallery talks organized by the Center.

About Center Fellowships

Since its inception in 1979 with the opening of the National Gallery’s East Building, the Center has promoted the study of the production, use, and cultural meaning of art, artifacts, architecture, urbanism, photography, and film from all places and periods through the formation of a community of scholars. In selecting its fellows, the Center seeks to broaden scholarship in the visual arts. Center fellowships are made possible by the generous support of private benefactors. More information about the Center’s fellowships can be found here.

Fellows

Professors
Liza S. Kirwin, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (emerita)
Kress-Beinecke Professor, 2026–2027

Erica Moiah James, University of Miami
Andrew W. Mellon Professor, 2026–2028

Kathleen Christian, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, 2026–2027

Senior Fellows
Alexander Bevilacqua, Williams College
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow
The Mask of Battle: European Chivalry in the Age of Discovery

Subhashini Kaligotla, Columbia University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow
Seeing Ghosts: Death and the Afterlife in the Art of Premodern India

Alison Locke Perchuk, California State University, Channel Islands
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow
Visualizing the Apocalypse in Medieval Europe: Narrative Structure, Location, Function, Meaning

Daniel Savoy, Manhattan University
Paul Mellon Senior Fellow
Architecture of the Soul: Buildings, Cities, and the Construction of Life in Early Modern Italy

Maya Stiller, University of Kansas
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow
Sensing the Buddha Land: Architecture, Sound, and Devotion in Late Chosŏn Korea

Jennifer Van Horn, University of Delaware
William C. Seitz Senior Fellow
To Make Otherwise: Disabilities and US Art History, 1780–1950

Ailsa Mellon Bruce National Gallery of Art Sabbatical Fellows
Maggie Wessling, Department of Photograph Conservation
Oral History and Genealogy of Master Photograph Printers

Postdoctoral Fellows
Carole Nataf
A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2026–2028 
Rococo Enlightenment: Art, Decoration, and the Natural Sciences in the 18th-Century French World

Ana Cristina Perry, Oberlin College and Conservatory
Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025–2027
Methods of Encounter: Raphael Montañez Ortiz and an Anti-Colonial Alternative Art

Predoctoral Dissertation Fellows (in Residence)
Sylvia Faichney, University of California, Santa Barbara
Wyeth Fellow, 2025–2027 
The Domesticated Landscape of War: Army Family Housing, Settler Belonging, and Environmental Toxicity in the United States

Elizabeth Keto, Yale University
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2025–2027 
Reconstruction’s Objects: Art in the United States South, 1865–1900

Ekaterina Koposova, Yale University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2025–2027 
The Flow of Art in the Franco-Dutch War

Khushmi Mehta, CUNY Graduate Center
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2025–2027 
Entangled Narratives: Formations of Collectivity and Community at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (1960s–1980s)

Sharon Mizbani, Yale University
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2025–2027 
Mediated Waters: Architecture of Thirst and Nourishment in Late Ottoman Istanbul

Emily Whitehead, Emory University
David E. Finley Fellow, 2024–2027
Variance and Innovation in Middle Kingdom Coffins at a Time of Standardization and Homogeneity

Margaret Wilson, The Ohio State University
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2024–2027
Making and Breaking Enclosure: The Movement of Art Through Late Medieval Convents

Predoctoral Dissertation Fellows (Not in Residence)
Diane Ahn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2026–2028
“Alien Trends” in American Art: Issei Painters, Cultural Performance, and National Identity (1885–1942)

Trevor Brandt, University of Chicago
David E. Finley Fellow, 2025–2028 
Prints and Piety at the Edges of the German-Speaking World, c. 1650–1800

Tony Y. Cui, University of Maryland, College Park
Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2026–2027 
A Temperate Vision: Art and Climate in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Anahit Galstyan, University of California, Santa Barbara
Twenty-Four-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2026–2028
Living with the Dead: Commemorative Architecture and the Senses in Medieval Ahlat

Timothy Hampshire, Harvard University
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2026–2029 
The Vatican Virgil and Its Public

Bennett Harrison, Yale University
David E. Finley Fellow, 2026–2029 
Lapidary Drift: Architectural Sculpture Between Catalonia and Aragonese Italy, 1440–1530

Angelika Ellen Joseph, Princeton University
Twelve-Month Wyeth Fellow, 2026–2027
Red Power Take-Over: Native American Activists, Colonial Landscapes, and the Design of Sovereignty

Clare Frances Kemmerer, Johns Hopkins University
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2026–2028
Always with Us: Arts of Poverty and Care in Central Europe, 1400–1600

Janina López, University of Pittsburgh
Twenty-Four-Month Wyeth Fellow, 2026–2028
The Royal Chicano Air Force’s Comuniversidad: Public Art and Education in Northern California Since 1969

Sofia Pitouli, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2025–2028 
The Pindos Mountains: Land, Art, and Community (13th–15th Centuries)

Cecília Resende Santos, Columbia University
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2026–2028
Building the Coffee Cycle: Architecture, Infrastructure, and Landscape in Brazil, c. 1880–1930

Joseph Shaikewitz, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Twelve-Month Ittleson Fellow, 2026–2027
Unimaginable: Travesti Visualities in Latin/x America, 1890s–1960s

Emilela Thomas-Adams, The Ohio State University
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow, 2026–2027
Silk and Skin: Repair and Recycling in Late Medieval Objects

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