For the second time in a decade, doctoral students in MIT's History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program (HTC) have garnered five of the top national honors available to graduate students conducting research in these areas.
The four students have been awarded:
- the Wyeth Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts;
- a predoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute;
- the Luce/ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Fellowship;
- the Chateaubriand Fellowship; and
- the Graduate Research Fellowship from the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard.
The five awards are among the field’s most prestigious in the United States, drawing hundreds of applicants, according to Arindam Dutta, head of the HTC program and associate professor of architectural history.
“HTC’s continued success speaks both to the talent of students that we continue to attract, as well as the devotion and dedication of our faculty,” Dutta says. “The MIT environment is another factor, pushing students to pursue research that is continually breaking norms. And taking risks has clearly brought our students this well-deserved recognition.”
The four students are:
Michael Kubo (Wyeth Fellowship)
The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), part of the National Gallery of Art, awards the Wyeth Fellowship to support the advancement and completion of a doctoral dissertation that concerns aspects of art of the United States, including native and pre-Revolutionary America. Kubo’s research traces the rise and international extension of collective and corporate architectural practices in the United States after World War II.
Christopher Ketcham (Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship)
The Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art are awarded annually to 10 doctoral students in any stage of PhD dissertation research or writing. Ketcham’s dissertation studies the significance of the city and its modular architectures as a source of material, form, and logic in artists’ work and writing in 1960s-70s New York.
Kelly Presutti (Chateaubriand Fellowship and Minda de Gunzburg Center Fellowship)
Presutti received two major awards. The first is the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences, presented by the French Embassy in the United States. The Graduate Research Fellowships from the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard supports doctoral students in the social sciences at both Harvard University and MIT who plan to spend six to 12 months in Europe conducting dissertation research. Presutti’s project, for which she received the grants, asks how landscape imagery in painting, decorative arts, and popular culture contributed to the formation of both modern French art and the modern French nation.
Niko Vicario (Getty Predoctoral Fellowship)
Awarded by the Getty Foundation, the Getty Predoctoral Fellowship assists emerging scholars in completing work on projects related to the Getty Research Institute’s annual theme. Aligning with this year’s theme of “Art and Materiality,” Vicario’s research analyzes how artists and works of art negotiated the transition from Latin America’s export age in the 19th century to the postwar period.
