Katherine Brion, an associate professor of art history and museum studies at New College of Florida, won the 2024 Walter J. Jensen Fellowship in recognition of her exceptional work as a scholar and teacher of French art and culture. The award provides this year’s winner with a stipend of $17,000 and round-trip travel to France for six months of continuous study.
Brion (ΦΒΚ, University of California, Berkeley) earned her master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and also received a Diplôme Spéciale de Muséologie from the École du Louvre. The fellowship will support work on her book project, “Art for the Working Classes: Aesthetic Education Initiatives and the Democratization of the Visual Arts in France, 1894-1914.” Brion will examine a range of Belle Époque initiatives to make the visual arts available and accessible to popular and working-class audiences, in order to highlight the complex interplay between social constraint and transformation in these efforts to democratize aesthetic experience and education.
Ella Kirsh, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, received the 2024 Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship for exceptional young scholars in the field of French or Greek language, literature, and culture.
Kirsh earned her Master of Studies with Distinction in Greek and Latin languages and literature at the University of Oxford and her Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in Literae Humaniores at the University of Oxford.
The fellowship’s $20,000 stipend will allow Kirsh to continue research for her book project, “The Memory-Writers: A Social and Intellectual History of Shorthand in Late Antiquity,” which tracks the development of shorthand as a cultural artifact through the fourth to the seventh centuries CE. Her project, she explains, “weaves together this linguistic history of shorthand with an investigation of shorthand-writers in the institutional record” and “reveals both how shorthand-writers were viewed by others and how lives spent toggling between symbols and alphabets influenced the way they imagined themselves and their society.”
Learn more about this year’s winners and ΦBK’s fellowships at pbk.org.