Three Binghamton University art historians were recently selected for prestigious external awards.

Assistant Professor Aruna D’Souza was awarded a highly competitive Clark Fellowship for research in Spring 2008 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. D’Souza will work at the Clark on her new book, Open Secrets: Intimacy between Public and Private in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Research on one of the chapters of this book, “Strange Bedfellows: Vallotton, Marriage, and the Dreyfus Affair,” is also being supported by a Library Research Grant from The Getty Research Center in Los Angeles.

In its first year of operation, the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded Associate Professor Tom McDonough a major grant. The award will support McDonough’s project, “Inhabiting Authoritarianism: Students and the Iranian Pavilion in Paris, 1961-79, ” which is in collaboration with the artist Nancy Davenport. The project will focus on the production of a “biography” of the modernist pavilion designed by Claude Parent during a tumultuous period in French and Iranian history.

Also, the Metropolitan Museum has awarded Professor John Tagg the J. Clawson Mills Art History Fellowship for research at the Museum in the Department of Photographs. The Fellowship is the Metropolitan Museum’s only award for senior art historians, and Professor Tagg will use it to develop his study: “Politics and Meaning on the Eve of Revolution: Walker Evans’s Photographs for The Crime of Cuba.”

The faculty of the Department of Art History at Binghamton University has built up an extraordinary record of success in winning external recognition, external funding and prestigious external awards. Current faculty have held major fellowships from the major sponsors of advanced research in the discipline, including the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Fulbright Research Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.