Art History & Visual Studies Nexus for Art Fellowships

In 2016, Jeffrey Rubinoff gave an endowment to the Fine Arts department that established a recurring four-year PhD fellowship in the area of modern and contemporary art history, allowing doctoral students exceptional opportunities to study the complexities and richness of modern and contemporary art history. This endowment also provided travel and costs for the Fellowship scholar and a cohort of Fine Arts students to attend the annual Company of Ideas forum, established by Rubinoff in 2008 to engage scholarly collaborators from around the world with the advancement of education in the arts.

Munazzah Akhtar was the first PhD candidate to be awarded this fellowship.  She was awarded the University of Oxford Barakat Trust Award in 2014 and is currently a SSHRC Doctoral fellow (2015-2017) and Ian H. Stewart Graduate Student Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. Her doctoral research focused on Islamic art and architecture, specifically between the 1300s – 1500s at the necropolis of Makli, Sindh in Pakistan.

If you are interested in reading Akhar’s dissertation, it is linked below.

Anna O’Meara became the second doctoral fellowship recipient in 2021. During this time, she published a co-edited volume of On the Poverty of Student Life (Common Notions 2022) that included an introduction about how the Situationist International (1957-1972) was influenced by Zengakuren, the largest Japanese Student Union; she presented research at UAAC and CAA; she traveled to the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library at Yale to visit the special collections of multiple members of the Situationist International. Recently, O’Meara taught Internationalist Film & the Avant-Garde as a Sessional Instructor at the University of Victoria. In Summer 2021, she received a federal grant, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), in order to study Arabic for her research. O’Meara received an MA in Art History from the University of Notre Dame in 2013 and an MaT from the Relay Graduate School of Education in 2020.

If you want to check out On the Poverty of Student Life, the link is below.