Samuel H. Kress Foundation Teaching Fellowship

The Archives of American Art is pleased to invite applications from college-level art history faculty to participate in a six-month virtual teaching fellowship that will run from October 2022 through April 2023. Anyone teaching art history at the college or university level, including part-time and adjunct instructors, is invited to apply. The fellowship will support the development of course syllabi and assignments that make central use of primary sources for teaching undergraduate art history.

In offering the fellowship program, the Archives wishes to promote primary source literacy and research skills, foster creative experimentation in art-historical pedagogy, and encourage the use of the Archives' online collections, including more than three million freely available digital files.

This six-month fellowship will involve meeting on Zoom twice a month for seminars with prominent guest speakers, peer-to-peer feedback sessions, and focused workshops. The curriculum is designed to help each participant create an innovative syllabus featuring assignments that make use of primary sources. Fellows will work closely with Archives staff to identify materials relevant to their teaching. They will also consult with the program's experienced mentors, who will provide expert guidance and feedback.

Fellowship recipients will submit a completed syllabus with their assignment plans to the Archives by June 1, 2023, to be made available online. In addition to responding to a final program evaluation, they will also be asked to provide feedback about the experience implementing their syllabus, including their assessment of student performance.

Each of the ten fellows, selected by a review panel, will be awarded an honorarium of $5,000 for participation in the program. Participants will also receive a $790 Digitization on Demand stipend for digitizing materials not available on the Archives website but deemed necessary for their teaching.   

Program schedule

Participants will meet on the following Fridays, twice monthly, from 1:00 to 2:30p ET:

• October 14, 2022
• November 4, 2022
• November 18, 2022*
• December 2, 2022
• December 16, 2022
• January 6, 2023
• January 20, 2023
• February 3, 2023
• February 17, 2023
• March 3, 2023
• March 17, 2023
• April 7, 2023, and
• April 21, 2023

Participants are required to attend all sessions, complete readings, prepare materials, and provide detailed feedback for their peers.

*The seminar on November 18th will be held from 1:15 to 2:45p ET.

Applications

A completed application will consist of a narrative statement of no more than two pages and a CV, submitted as a single PDF to AAA-TeachingWithPrimarySources@si.edu. In their statement, applicants should:

• demonstrate their commitment to teaching art history at the college level;
• discuss relevant courses they have taught, including class size, level, and content;
• describe their engagement, if any, with archival material in their teaching experience;
• confirm their commitment to participating in all program activities; and
• address how the fellowship would benefit their professional growth as a teacher and the classroom experience of their students as well.

The Archives of American Art values diversity and seeks broad representation among participants, including instructors from city or community colleges, adjunct professors, and those who work predominantly with non-art-history majors.  Additionally, the Archives seeks to expand traditional art-historical narratives and encourages the use of archival records of underrepresented artists and arts organizations.

Deadline

The application deadline is September 2, 2022. Applicants will be notified of the committee’s decision by September 16. For further information, please contact Thomas Edwards at EdwardsTh@si.edu.

Teaching with Primary Sources has been generously supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

About the Archives of American Art

Founded in 1954, the Archives of American Art fosters advanced research through the accumulation and dissemination of primary sources, unequaled in historical depth and breadth, that document more than two hundred years of our nation’s artists and art communities. The Archives provides access to these materials through its exhibitions and publications, including the Archives of American Art Journal, the longest-running scholarly journal in the field of American art. An international leader in the digitizing of archival collections, the Archives makes more than 3 million digital images freely available online. The Archives’ oral history collection includes more than 2,500 audio interviews, the largest accumulation of in-depth, first-person accounts of the American art world.

About the Samuel H. Kress Foundation

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation was established in 1929 to sustain and carry out the original vision of its founder, Samuel H. Kress (1863-1955). They support the work of individuals and institutions engaged with the appreciation, interpretation, preservation, study and teaching of the history of European art and architecture from antiquity to the dawn of the modern era.

They serve the field of art history as practiced in American art museums and institutions of higher education, and in an array of research centers and libraries throughout the world. They further support training and research in art conservation as well as the professional practice of art conservation.

They make grants in defined program areas and offer professional development fellowships for historians of art and architecture, art conservators, art museum curators and educators, and art librarians.