2019 University of Maryland-Phillips Collection Fellowships Awarded

The University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection has awarded its 2019–20 Postdoctoral Fellowships in Visual Culture to Marlaina Martin, Ph.D., and in Modern and Contemporary Art History to Alison Boyd, Ph.D.

The Phillips Collection and the University of Maryland host the postdoctoral fellowships during the academic year. Each fellowship allows recipients to work with the Phillips’s exceptional collection and the University of Maryland’s leadership programs in art historical scholarship, interdisciplinary experimentation, and virtual technologies. During the academic year, fellows teach at least one public lecture and participate in other programs and discussions with scholars, critics, museum staff, and students at the museum and university.

“Dr. Marlaina Martin’s expertise in the anthropologies of race, gender, and media, and Dr. Alison Boyd’s studies on race and modernism complements the Phillips’s strong commitment to fostering an inclusive environment that encourages and values diversity in both our collection and our exhibitions,” said Klaus Ottmann, Ph.D., chief curator and deputy director for academic affairs. “Their work at the Phillips will significantly expand art-historical and cultural scholarship—a mission of the museum and priority of its founder Duncan Phillips.”

“The scholarly works of Drs. Martin and Boyd play a key role in helping us understand our countries’ past and the complex experiences of various identity groups,” said Mary Ann Rankin, senior vice president and provost at the University of Maryland. “We congratulate them on this fellowship and look forward to seeing how their innovative work is advanced and shared over the next year.”

Marlaina H. Martin received her Ph.D. from the Cultural Anthropology program at Rutgers University in 2019. During her time there, Martin was a recipient of a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation as well as a University & Louis Bevier Dissertation Completion Fellowship from Rutgers University. Her research interests include critical race theory, colorblindness, and post-racialism; Black feminism; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; body and embodiment studies; cultural studies and media production studies; and anthropologies of race, gender, and media. Her dissertation, “’Making Their Own’: Creativity, Strategy, and Authority among Black Women Media Makers in New York City,” explores the numerous negotiations, decisions, and compromises that Black women independent media makers–as members of a doubly marginalized social group–navigated in order to cultivate authority and develop creative projects.

Alison Boyd completed her Ph.D. in Art History and as a Mellon Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University in 2017. She studies the intersection of multiple modernities in American and European art with a focus on the arts of the African diaspora, the politics of display, and gender theory. She is writing a book manuscript, "Modernism for America: Negro Art and Primitivism at the Barnes Foundation, 1917–1951," which investigates the racial underpinnings of modern art’s reception in the United States. She is also researching a second project, “‘Your country? How came it yours?’: Divergent Artistic and Political Claims for the ‘Soil’ in America in the 1930s.” This project examines how artists from different American identity groups conceptualized their relationship to the soil; it includes a case study on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series.