Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Friday, November 16, 2018 in HART, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of African American art, has received a Dean’s Faculty Fellowship that was recently awarded by John Geer, dean of the College of Arts and Science. VanDiver, one of seven A&S tenure-track faculty members to be named a Dean’s Faculty Fellow, will hold the title for two years and receive additional support for her research.

The Dean’s Faculty Fellows Program was launched this year to support untenured faculty in their research, scholarship, and creative expression during their probationary period. “These faculty were selected because of their scholarly accomplishments and the promise they show to make an impact in their respective fields,” said Dean Geer. “We look forward to continuing this program in the coming years as a way of providing additional support to our junior faculty and helping to advance their creativity and discovery.”

Named a 2018-2019 Faculty Fellow with the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, VanDiver is currently participating in a year-long interdisciplinary faculty seminar to explore the significance of printed words and images in early modern Europe and North America. She teaches courses on modern/contemporary African American and African art and visual culture.

Her research, centered on 20th-century black women artists, African American artistic engagements with Africa, and the politics of exhibition and display, has appeared in Archives of American Art Journal, Space and Culture, Callaloo, and Transition.  Her book-length manuscript on Loïs Mailou Jones will be published by the Pennsylvania State University Press under the title Negotiating Traditions: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Composite Aesthetics of Blackness.