Ashley E. Kim Duffey Awarded 2024-25 Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellowship

PhD candidate Ashley E. Kim Duffey has been appointed as a William H. Truettner Predoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Big Ten Academic Alliance Fellow in the Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program. Duffey will be in residence to pursue research at the Smithsonian American Art Museum during the 2024-2025 academic year. Her dissertation titled "(Re)visioning Kinship: Photographies of U.S.–Korean Adoption since 1953" considers the role of photography in the development and practice of U.S.-Korean adoption since its beginnings during the Korean War to the present. Through methods of visual and material culture studies; critical autoethnography; and critical race theory, she argues that popular press, bureaucratic, vernacular, and fine art photographies that both enable and respond to transnational adoption have shaped not only the processes of adoption, but also American ideals of race, family, and citizenship.