Assistant Professor of Art History Julia Lum has been awarded a 2023 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art. As a recipient of this prestigious fellowship, Lum has been recognized as one of 10 outstanding early-career art historians from around the world whose innovative scholarship stands to make substantial and original contributions to the understanding of art and its history. This year’s fellows were selected for their capacity to expand the field of art history and explore previously understudied regions of the world.
Lum’s fellowship project, Landfalls: Art Between Britain and Polynesia, reexamines and re-centers art history in the Pacific region from the 18th century onward, with a particular focus on the role landscape painting played in British colonization in the aftermath of James Cook’s voyages from 1768–79. Landfalls “tracks a shifting set of artistic and material collisions between European and Indigenous spatial frameworks, cultures of environmental management, and distinct attitudes toward land and ocean resources,” Lum’s abstract explains. “Through a series of historic case studies, interwoven with analyses of contemporary Indigenous interventions in the visual archive, this project repositions ‘landscape’ at the intersection of culturally-shaped environments and the aesthetic claims of an imperial imaginary.”
Each 12-month fellowship includes a $60,000 stipend and an additional $5,000 for travel and research. The awards are non-residential, allowing emerging scholars to pursue their research anywhere in the world, while also granting access to the rich digital scholarly resources and networks of Getty and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). At the close of their fellowship year, the cohort will convene at the Getty Center in Los Angeles for a week to present their research to each other and the wider Getty community.
The fellowship program is made possible by a major grant from Getty and is administered by the ACLS, the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.