Library and Archives

The Amon Carter Museum’s Davidson Family Fellowship provides support for scholars working toward the Ph.D. or at the postdoctoral level to research topics in the history of American art that relate to objects in the museum’s permanent collections. The program was established in 2000 by a generous grant from the Davidson Family Charitable Foundation. Each year a candidate is selected to either begin or continue work on a project that involves object-oriented research with the museum’s outstanding collections of paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and illustrated books.

Candidates should have a demonstrated knowledge of the history of American art and culture in areas represented by the museum’s collections: paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and illustrated books from 1835 to 1950, and photography from its beginning to the present. Proposals from qualified individuals in disciplines other than art history are also welcome. Preference will be given to proposals that utilize more than one aspect of the Amon Carter Museum’s collections and resources, which include an extensive research library, six photographers’ archives, and a microfilm set of the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Awards are based on merit and are open to all qualified individuals.

The Davidson Fellowship stipend is $5,000 for a minimum four-week period of full-time research at the Amon Carter Museum. In special instances, additional funds for travel and lodging may be awarded at the discretion of the museum’s fellowship committee. At the end of the research period, the Davidson Fellow is expected to make a public presentation on his or her work. The next application deadline is March 15, 2010, for a fellowship period that should occur between May 1 and September 30, 2010. The Davidson Fellowship application must include the completed application form; a cover letter; a description of the project with a work plan that should not exceed four pages in length; a resumé; an official transcript if the candidate is currently enrolled in a graduate program; and three letters of recommendation.

For additional information, please e-mail samuel [dot] duncan [at] cartermuseum [dot] org (samuel.duncan@cartermuseum.org) or write to:

Davidson Family Fellowship
Attn: Samuel Duncan, Library Director
Amon Carter Museum
3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard
Fort Worth, Texas 76107-2695

Previous Fellowship Recipients

2009

• Aaron Carico, PhD Candidate, American Studies, Yale University
  Portrait as Still Life: Slavery, the Politics of Realism, and William Harnett’s Attention, Company!

2008

• Nancy Palm, PhD Candidate, Indiana University
  Thomas Cole’s National Landscapes and the Context of Indian Identity Construction in Nineteenth-Century America: Preliminary Findings at the Amon Carter Museum

2007

• Mark White, Oklahoma State University
  Art as a Social Expression: Stuart Davis, Communication, and the Agency of Abstraction
• Shirley Reece-Hughes, Independent Scholar
  Uncovering America’s Vernacular Past: Artist Immigrants and Cross-Culturalism in the Age of Early Modernism