College wins Whiting, Mellon grants

Two professors in Wheaton's Art and Art History Department have won Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation fellowships for off-campus study, while the college was awarded a $200,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to promote faculty research.

Associate Professor of Art Evelyn Lane's Whiting Fellowship will take her to Italy, France and Baltimore, where she will pursue research on the architecture, sculpture and stained glass in medieval buildings. In Italy she will focus on San Clemente in Rome, as well as the Pisa, Siena and Milan cathedrals; the study will help Lane enrich the scope of her course on Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture. In France she plans to travel to St. Julien du Sault and Bayeux, where she will conduct studies on the Bayeux Tapestry with an eye toward designing a lab that will employ digital image analysis to detect color thresholding and restoration in medieval tapestry. In Baltimore she will conduct research for her current manuscript, Corpus Vitrearum United States of America: Stained Glass Before 1700 in Baltimore, Maryland, to be published by Harvey Miller Publishers.

Assistant Professor of Art History Allison Levy will use her Whiting award to travel to Florence, where she will study the early development of tomb sculpture. The research will enhance her manuscript, "Grave Sites: Memorial Culture and Monumental Absence in Early Modern Florence," an interdisciplinary text on commemorative practice and monument-making in early modern Italy. Levy also won an American Association of University Women Fellowship for next year. Of the 12 recipients, she is the only art historian.

The Mellon grant is meant to promote the pursuit of faculty research within and on the borders of their respective disciplines that will, in turn, generate exciting new intellectual directions to feed back into the curriculum. This initiative stems from the results of the Wheaton Curriculum, introduced in 2003, which capitalizes on the cross-fertilization of interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches to learning. The grant will underwrite faculty research opportunities, support the hiring of student research assistants, sponsor collaborative workshops for faculty and consultants, and provide funds to engage in assessment activities that were mandated when the curriculum was adopted.