WILLIAMSTOWN, MA- The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute announced 11 Clark Fellows for the 2006-2007 academic year. Fellowships are awarded to national and international scholars, critics, and museum professionals whose work extends and enhances the understanding of the visual arts and their role in culture. The program encourages a critical commitment to research in the theory, history, and interpretation of works from all periods and genres.

Fall Clark Fellows are:
Ernst van Alphen, awarded the Clark/Oakley Fellowship, is professor of literary studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. As the first Clark/Oakley Fellow, van Alphen will pursue his research project: "Affective Globalism: Cultural Critique in Times of Globalization."Heinrich Dilly is professor of art history at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. While at the Clark, his project will focus on how the discipline of art history was formed out of international communities of scholars and their networks of correspondence in the 19th-century. Finbarr Barry Flood is assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts at New York University whose research and teaching focuses on Islamic Art. At the Clark, he will be working on a study of the theory and practice of iconoclasm in the Islamic world and its role in Euro-American representations of Islamic cultures. Serge Guilbaut is professor of art history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. At the Clark, he will finish The Spittle, the Square and the (Un) Happy Worker, a book about art debates in post-war Paris and will prepare for the upcoming exhibition, Be Bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images and All That Jazz in the 1950's in Barcelona (2007). Arden Reed is the Dole Professor of English at Pomona College. While at the Clark, he will work on Slow Art: From Tableaux Vivants to James Turrell, a book that addresses problems of attentiveness in the arts by theorizing an aesthetic tradition which runs counter to "speed culture." Ann Reynolds is associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History and Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. At the Clark she will be working on a new book project, Playtime: Creativity and Community New York, 1940-1970, which will address the formal, theoretical, and social circumstances of various creative communities in New York from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Spring Clark Fellows are:

Malcolm Bull teaches at Oxford University's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. While at the Clark, he will be looking at the role of trust in modern art and re-examining the historical and social significance of artistic modernisms of the period 1900-70.

Darby English is assistant professor of art history at the University of Chicago, where he teaches postwar American art and visual and cultural studies. English's project at the Clark will comprise a historiographic study of so-called "post-black" art, focusing on the peculiar convergence of racialism and formalism in this supposed "aesthetic turn."

James Meyer is associate professor of art history at Emory University and contributing editor of Artforum. During his stay at the Clark, Meyer will develop a book of essays on the "return of the sixties" in contemporary art and art history.

Carolyn Tate is professor of pre-Columbian and Native American art at the School of Art, Texas Tech University. As a Clark Fellow, she will pursue her book project, a study of women's knowledge as expressed in the art of the preliterate (900 - 400 BC), or Olmec period of Mexico, testing a variety of analytical methods to expand contemporary perspectives of the period.

Lowery Sims is president of The Studio Museum in Harlem and former curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a Clark Fellow, she will be examining the phenomena of appropriation and parody in the work of African-American artists, with particular attention to the contextualization of these works within contemporary criticism.

Clark Fellows are provided with offices in the Institute's library and apartments in the Clark scholars' residence. Fellows present public lectures about recent research during their residency, and select and introduce films for which they have a particular fondness. For a schedule of lectures and films, visit www.clarkart.edu.