First Art History Resident
We are delighted to announce that Rebecca Gill will be awarded the first Art History Residency from the Association and the Ampersand Foundation. The residency, which was launched this year, offers a researcher the opportunity for concentrated time to further their work in the quiet Derbyshire countryside. It will run from October 2021 to January of 2022.
Rebecca’s research focuses on the work of the Counter Reformation architect Galeazzo Alessi who was active in north-west Italy during the sixteenth century. Her forthcoming book seeks to redress the lack of critical attention given to Alessi’s architecture, a result of the fact that he worked in cities outside the traditional focus of Renaissance studies.
On being selected as the first resident, Rebecca said, “I applied for the residency because I was looking for an opportunity that would give me the time to write my book. I have been living with this project for many years. It started life as my PhD thesis, which looked at three churches designed by Alessi, and has since expanded to encompass all of his ecclesiastical works. As my career has progressed, however, teaching jobs and new research projects took precedence over the book and as a result the project has progressed slowly. This residency presents the perfect opportunity to dedicate myself wholly to my book project and write up the research that I have slowly put together over the past eight years.”
The Association for Art History is pleased to be working with the Ampersand Foundation to offer this unique opportunity to a researcher in our field. The residency speaks to the heart of the mission of the Association to advance the study and practice of art history. We appreciate how precious research time is to scholars and we are pleased to be able to be able to make available a research opportunity like this.
It was a difficult selection process, as Gregory Perry, CEO of Association for Art History notes; “Applications for this opportunity were very compelling, as one might expect for a unique opportunity such as this. Rebecca Gill has established a good track record of scholarship in academia and with public-facing work in the gallery sector. The panel felt that her contribution to the scholarship on Galeazzo Alessi was a needed one which it was happy to support via the residency. We are very grateful to the Ampersand Foundation for helping art historians to further their work through the residency and for the resulting benefit to the field that it represents.”
Rebecca will be invited to give a lecture at the University of Nottingham on completion of the residency.
Image: example of Alessi’s architecture in Genova. Photo by Rebecca Gill.