2020 Dunlap Fellowship Winner: Anna Flinchbaugh

The William Morris Society in the U.S. is pleased to award the 2020 Dunlap Fellowship to Anna Flinchbaugh. Ms. Flinchbaugh holds a BA in Anthropology and Environmental Studies from Middlebury College. She is currently a candidate in Pratt Institute's M.S.L.I.S. and M.A. History of Art and Design program. Her research focuses on late nineteenth and early twentieth century textile design history. Here is Ms. Flinchbaugh’s summary of her project, “The Mycorrhizal Morris: A Network Analysis of the Morris & Co. Embroidery Workshop”:

Cushion Cover (ca 1900) embroidered by May Morris. 

This work is part of the Botanical Expressions exhibition

at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. 

Drawing upon my roots in anthropology as well as my recent experiences with linked data in library and information sciences, my research in design history is centered on the deep conviction that more nuanced understandings of aesthetic impulses and influences are made possible through the examination of holistic communities than through exemplary individuals. While William Morris was certainly a singular genius, a true understanding of the reach of his ideas requires looking not simply at his own accomplishments, but at the wider network of artists, makers, suppliers, and customers that he brought together. The Morris & Co. Embroidery Workshop provides an ideal site to begin this web-weaving. My previous academic work within Pratt Institute’s History of Art and Design graduate program has revolved heavily around nineteenth century textiles and embroidery, including research on May Morris and floral wallpapers for Anca Lasc’s Daughters of Eve: Glamorized Femininity, Fashion, and Interiors From Versailles To Today and on the Medieval roots of the art needlework movement for Frima Hofrichter’s Art by Women: 15th Century to the Present. I recently returned to research on May and William Morris in my work as a curatorial intern for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s upcoming exhibition Botanical Expressions, a project that solidified for me the feedback loops between natural environment and artistic expression that underpin the work of the Morris & Co. Embroidery Workshop. 

Finally, echoing William Morris’ conviction in the importance of firsthand experience, I also draw upon more than five years of work as a natural dyer and textile artist. Building upon the work of Morris scholars such as Virginia Davis and Ray Watkinson, my current research aims to explore the ways in which the personal and professional relationships between the individuals at the Leek Embroidery Society, Merton Abbey Mills, and Morris & Co. Embroidery Workshop, as well as private contractors for Morris & Co, impacted the aesthetic output of the firm. Operating within the frameworks of political economy and ecology, this work hopes to make more visible Morris’ guiding belief in the dialectical relationship between the goods produced and the means of production. It will trace object histories from the gathering of dyestuffs to the purchase of pillows, taking note of all the human relationships that form along those journeys. The Huntington Library in San Marino holds a rich trove of resources that address these questions, including Morris’ Merton Abbey Dyebook and letters of William and May Morris. Given the rare and fragile nature of these materials, an in-person visit to the library is a must for my research needs. Once these ideas are investigated and arranged, the Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution’s forthcoming conference Retailing, Distribution and the Natural World: Historical Perspectives presents an ideal staging ground for this conversation, through its emphasis on the intersections of ecology, aesthetics, and consumption. I would like to use any funding provided by the Dunlap Fellowship to support my travel to the Huntington Library and to Retailing, Distribution and the Natural World: Historical Perspectives conference. Ultimately, this research will form the first chapter of my master’s thesis exploring the links between the Arts & Crafts movement in England and the Celtic Revival in Ireland through the embroidery and textile works produced by the two respective communities.

 

Dunlap Award Winner Shyam Patel

The William Morris Society in the U.S. is pleased to award the 2018 Dunlap Fellowship to Shyam Patel, a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation concerns the relationships among moral perfectionism, political utopianism, and aesthetic organicism in the work of British authors and artists (including William Morris) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here is Shyam’s summary of his project:

In the Morris portion of my dissertation – “Romanticism, Socialism, and Organicism: The Aesthetic of William Morris’ Late-Career Politics” – I locate the ideological unity of Morris’ dedication to artistic production and political activism in the Romantic tradition of organicism, whose simultaneous critique of political economy and advocacy of aesthetic autonomy Morris sought to embody over the course of his multifaceted career.  Focusing on the last decade of Morris’s life, I argue that the complementarity of the Romantics’ organic models for artistic activity and social life helps to demonstrate both the aesthetic dimensions of Morris’ work organizing for the Socialist League (from 1884 to 1890) and the political dimensions of his work managing the Kelmscott Press (from 1891 to 1896).  I claim that Morris’ turn from the former to the latter represents not an apolitical “retreat” into pure aesthetics, but rather an attempt to practically realize on a smaller, private scale the Romantic union of aesthetic and political organicism that his previous cultural criticism and socialist activism sought to secure on the grander scales of public opinion and policy, respectively.

Kelmscott Press logo

                                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                              

Kelmscott Press edition of Coleridge

The Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship will allow me to visit special collections at The University of Maryland and The University of Texas at Austin that contain manuscripts, letters, and ephemera from Morris’ work with the Kelmscott Press and the Socialist League.  The research at these collections will help me to develop this project in two directions.  On the one hand, it will allow me to complete a standalone article that reads Morris alongside the Romantic tradition of organicism, in order to challenge the ambiguities, equivocations, and binary oppositions that have become calcified in the scholarship concerning Morris’s relationships to Romanticism and socialism.  On the other hand, this research will be integrated into a dissertation that considers the function of organicist metaphors in Victorian aesthetics, sociology, and political economy more broadly, placing Morris in meaningful relation to Romantic and Victorian figures with whom he is not ordinarily associated, including Coleridge, De Quincey, Spencer, Mill, Dickens, and Hardy.

Hammersmith branch, Socialist League. Morris stands fifth from right on second row.

 

Dunlap Award Winner Sarah Leonard

The William Morris Society in the U.S. is pleased to award the 2017 Dunlap Fellowship to Sarah Leonard, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, “‘The beauty of the bough-hung banks’: William Morris in the Thames Landscape,” promises to be an important contribution not only to Morris studies but to understanding of the natural environment in the Victorian era. Here is Sarah's summary of her project:

My dissertation investigates the disparate riverside landscapes of the Victorian Thames as dominant presences in Morris’s varied and intertwined roles as designer, author, political thinker, and factory owner. As a lifelong London resident, Morris was most familiar with the polluted, industrialized city Thames. However, he drew visual inspiration from the rural landscape of the Upper Thames around Kelmscott for his famous pattern designs, and he put forward the same landscape as a medievalist and Socialist pastoral ideal in his poetry, novels, and political writings. At the same moment, he was searching out clean river water for the industrial production of his fabrics and using that water to wash dyestuffs away from his printed fabrics and downstream into the London river.

James McNeill Whistler, Thames Warehouses (1859; Freer Gallery)

In order to understand Morris’s thoughts on the Thames landscape, the inspiration he drew from it, and the ways he interacted with it, it is essential to consider the Thames and its tributaries as he might have known them – physically, in how they looked and functioned, and culturally, in how they were addressed by the writers, artists, and thinkers with whom Morris would have been familiar. Therefore, my combined landscape studies and art historical approach looks to art, literature, archival records, and the physical sites of Morris’s life to form a broad and detailed account of Morris’s Thames landscapes, their uses and depictions, and their cultural context. This account reveals the ways in which Morris’s physical and cultural landscapes manifested in the design and production of his works, focusing particularly on the series of printed patterned fabrics he named for tributaries of the Thames and its estuary: Cray, Evenlode, Kennet, Lea, Lodden, Medway, Wandle, Wey, and Windrush. 

William Morris, Wey (1883; V& A Museum)

I will use the funds provided by the Dunlap Fellowship to support a research trip to the United Kingdom, currently planned for summer 2017. During this trip, I will visit a number of council archives and local museums to view documentation and images of Morris’s riverside landscapes. This material, along with research I plan to undertake in the maps collection of the British Library, will help to reveal the historic features of Morris’s landscapes, as well as the changes they underwent both in his lifetime and in the ensuing 120 years. I will also view Thames imagery and ephemera at both the Museum of London and the River and Rowing Museum, Henley, and study Morris’s original tributary pattern designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Birmingham Art Gallery. All of this work is essential to my landscape- and ecology-focused interpretation of Morris’s works and legacy, and will contribute particularly to my dissertation chapters concerning Morris’s London and the Merton Abbey factory.

March Exhibit by 2012 WMS Award Winner a Success

Leslie Harwood at her Exhibition.

Last month, residents of Milwaukee could stroll down to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art History Gallery to see the exhibit “William Morris’ Earthly Paradise: Precursor to the Private Press Movement”. This was curated by Leslie Harwood, the 2012 winner of the William Morris Society Fellowship. We've written about her project here; the award went towards installation costs, and printing the lovely catalogue.

With the exhibition and catalogue, Harwood argued convincingly that the failure of the Chiswick Press to produce satisfactory trial pages of Morris and Burne-Jones's illustrated Earthy Paradise, followed by the failure of that whole project, strongly motivated Morris to found the Kelmscott Press. She also highlighted the influence of the Kelmscott Press over subsequent Arts & Crafts private presses.

The event showed off the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Special Collections, including The Earthly Paradise printed by the Kelmscott Press. Another crown jewel of the exhibition, loaned by the Milwaukee Public Library, was a fifteenth-century Venetian book (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) that inspired Morris and Burne- Jones in their designs for the Kelmscott Press.

Harwood's illustrated catalogue is like an exhibit unto itself, and it gives a thorough background to the original Earthly Paradise project and the Kelmscott Press. It also considers the Vale Press, the Essex House Press, the Elston Press, and the Golden Cockerel Press in relation to the Kelmscott Press. Electronic versions of the catalogue are available free of charge, just contact Ms. Harwood at leslie.harwood@gmail.com.

Click 'Read More' to see photos of the event:

2012 Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies

A reminder about the 2012 Fellowship in Pre-Raphaleite Studies offered by the University of Delaware Library and the Delaware Art Museum:

The University of Delaware Library in Newark, Delaware and the Delaware Art Museum invite applications for the 2012 joint Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies. This one-month Fellowship is intended for scholars working on the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. Up to $3,000 is available.

The Delaware Art Museum is home to the most important collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in the US. Assembled largely by Samuel Bancroft, Jr., the collection includes paintings, works on paper, decorative arts, manuscripts, and letters, and is augmented by the museum’s Helen Farr Sloan art library. With comprehensive holdings in books, periodicals, electronic resources, and microforms, the University of Delaware Library is a major resource for the study of literature and art. The Special Collections Department contains material related to the Pre-Raphaelites who are also well-represented in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection of Victorian books, manuscripts, and artworks.

Application deadline: October 15, 2011

More information: www.delart.org/education/fellowships.html or write to:

Pre-Raphaelite Studies Fellowship Committee
Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmere Parkway
Wilmington, DE 19806 USA

University of Delaware Library/Delaware Art Museum Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies

University of Delaware Library/Delaware Art Musum

FELLOWSHIP IN PRE-RAPHAELITE STUDIES

2011

The University of Delaware Library and the Delaware Art Museum are pleased to offer the 2011 joint Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite studies. This short-term, one-month Fellowship, awarded annually, is intended for scholars conducting significant research in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, associates, and followers. Research of a wider scope, which considers the Pre-Raphaelite movement and related topics in relation to Victorian art and literature, and cultural or social history, will also be considered. Projects which provide new information or interpretation—dealing with unrecognized figures, women writers and artists, print culture, iconography, illustration, catalogues of artists' works, or studies of specific object—are particularly encouraged, as are those which take into account transatlantic relations between Britain and the United States.

Receiving the Fellowship

The recipient will be expected to be in residence and to make use of the resources of both the Delaware Art Museum and the University of Delaware Library. The recipient may also take advantage of these institutions' proximity to other collections, such as the Winterthur Museum and Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Library, and the Bryn Mawr College Library. Each recipient is expected to make a public presentation about his or her research during the course of Fellowship residence.

Up to $2,500 is available for the one-month Fellowship. Housing is not provided, but the funds may be used for this purpose, or for travel and other research expenses.

The Fellowship is intended for those who hold a PhD or can demonstrate equivalent professional or academic experience. Applications from independent scholars and museum professionals are welcome. By arrangement with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, scholars may apply to each institution for awards in the same year; every effort will be made to offer consecutive dates.

Important Dates

The deadline to apply for the 2011 Fellowship is October 15, 2010. Applicants will be notified of who the successful candidate is by November 15, 2010. The chosen candidate will then be asked to provide a date for assuming the Fellowship by December 1, 2010.

Previous Fellows

Karen Yuen (2010), Independent Scholar, Vancouver, Canada

Thad Logan (2009), Department of English, Rice University

Colin Cruise (2008), Research Lecturer, The School of Art, University of Aberystwyth, Wales

About the Delaware Art Museum

Founded in 1912, the Delaware Art Museum is home to the largest and most important collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art in the United States. Assembled largely by the Wilmington industrialist, Samuel Bancroft, Jr., at the turn of the century (with significant subsequent additions), the collection includes paintings and drawings by all the major and minor Pre-Raphaelite artists, as well as decorative arts, prints, photographs, manuscripts, and rare books. The Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, with a reference collection of 30,000 volumes, holds Samuel Bancroft's papers and correspondence, a rich source for the history of collecting and provenance which also contains significant manuscript material by and about the Rossettis.

About the University of Delaware Library

The University of Delaware Library has broadly based and comprehensive collections—books, periodicals, electronic resources, microforms, government publications, databases, maps, manuscripts, media, and access to information via the Internet—which provide a major academic resource for the study of literature and art. Many printed and manuscript items related to the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates are in the Special Collections Department, including major archives relating to the Victorian artist and writer, George Adolphus Storey, and to the bibliographer and forger, Thomas J. Wise. The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, associated with the Special Collections Department, focuses on British literature and art of the period 1850 to 1900, with an emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelites and on the writers and illustrators of the 1890s. Its rich holdings comprise 7,000 first and other editions (including many signed and association copies), manuscripts, letters, works on paper (including drawings by Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti), and ephemera.

To Apply

To apply, send a completed application form, together with a description of your research proposal (maximum 1 page) and a curriculum vitae or resume (maximum 2 pages) to the address given below. These materials may also be sent via email to: fellowships@delart.org. Letters of support from two scholars or other professionals familiar with you and your work are also required. These must be sent by mail to:

Pre-Raphaelite Fellowship Committee

Delaware Art Museum

2301 Kentmere Parkway

Wilmington, DE 19806

For an application form go to:

www.delart.org/education/fellowships.html

Illustration: Edward Burne-Jones, The High History of the Holy Grail. Ink and watercolor, 1898 (Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library).