The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has announced the recipients of the 2019 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art, supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Each of the 11 advanced graduate students are selected based on their pursuit of promising research in object- and image-based US art history. Included among the 2019 fellows is UT Austin doctoral candidate in Art History Jessi DiTillio.
Fellows are given a year to spend researching and writing at either the fellow's home institution, abroad, or at another appropriate site for the research. DiTillio's dissertation, "After the Punchline: American Visual Parody since the 1970s as Generative Form," will focus on American artists of color who have used parody as a technique to generate new readings of art history.
From DiTillio's abstract:
Modern and contemporary American art contains abundant examples of visual parody, yet there is little analysis of this pervasive form. This project focuses on American artists of color who have used parody as a technique to generate new readings of art history. It examines parodies by Robert Colescott, Glenn Ligon, and Nao Bustamante to ponder questions of race, sexuality, authorship, and power. Reading these parodies in dialogue with the artworks they target, each chapter uses the dialogical structure of parody as a method for integrating the insights of contemporary art with the study of earlier periods of art history.
The list of recipients and their dissertation abstracts can be found on the Luce/ACLS Fellowship page.