Olivia Comstock Awarded 2025 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art

The Department of Art History is proud to announce that Olivia Comstock has been awarded a 2025 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. The program is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Comstock is one of seven emerging scholars awarded for their promising doctoral research on the history of the visual arts in the United States. The awards are designed to promote scholarship that advances and expands the field of art history, including research that elevates voices, narratives, and subjects that have been historically underrepresented in the academy, including all facets of Native American art. Each fellow receives $42,000 to support one year of research, writing, and fellowship-related travel between July 2025 and May 2027.

“The Henry Luce Foundation remains wholeheartedly committed to support for doctoral education in American art through the dissertation fellowships administered by our excellent partners at ACLS,” said Teresa Carbone, Program Director for American Art at the Henry Luce Foundation. “The Foundation is pleased, each year, to recognize excellence, new thinking, and new voices in the field, and to provide flexible funding that best serves the plans and needs of these rising field leaders.”

Comstock’s research critiques the antagonistic relationship between the studio craft movement, economic precarity, and race by providing the first study of Allen Fannin (1939 –2004), a studio craft practitioner known for his spinning and weaving between the 1960s and 1980s. Fannin’s frank appraisal of what he called “The Black Craftsman Situation” identified the limits of studio craft for those with “nitty-gritty needs.” This project gathers previously unarchived materials to examine different facets of Fannin’s practice: texture, how-to manuals, commercial production, and pedagogy. By considering the social and material stakes of Fannin’s work, this project pushes the field of American art to consider where race is found in the materials, techniques, and objects of American history.

“Over the last thirty-three years, alumni of this program have helped shape and transform the evolving field of American art history,” said ACLS Program Officer Alison Chang. “This year’s fellows show great potential to impact the field, and we are excited to support them as they chart new scholarly pathways.”