Lisa Aronson: Skidmore has awarded Associate Professor Aronson a Sabbatical Enhancement Award (SEA) to complete research on J. A. (Jonathan Adagogo) Green (1874-1905), one of the most prolific and accomplished image-makers – African or European – active in West Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The six weeks of fieldwork in Nigeria funded by the SEA grant will enable Lisa to document Green’s photographs – that include portraits of Africans and Europeans; landscapes; and staged, ethnographic reenactments – in archives and private collections so as to better understand the full extent of Green’s patronage and repertoire.  She will spend the remainder of her year-long sabbatical completing a collaborative book project on J. A. Green. Figures 1, 2 & 3.

Mimi Hellman: Associate Professor Mimi Hellman has been awarded a summer fellowship at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  She will work on a book about the hôtel de Soubise, an aristocratic residence in 18th-century Paris whose rococo interior, now partly restored and open to the public, figures prominently in the art-historical canon but is rarely studied as an expression of aesthetic and social values.  Mimi’s project explores how architecture and interior decoration negotiated the unstable dynastic identity of a family who aspired to an unusual, often contested status in the hierarchy of French court society.
 
Image caption:
Salon at the hôtel de Soubise, Paris, 1739.  Decorative scheme designed by Germain Boffrand; paintings by Charles-Joseph Natoire.  Photo: Mimi Hellman.

 
Saleema Waraich: Assistant Professor Saleema Waraich will be conducting archival research at the Chester Beatty Library (pictured) in Dublin, Ireland, and at the British Library in London for projects involving Mughal painting and architecture (mid-16th - mid–19th centuries) and 19th- and 20th-century British India.