Category: Art History
UD art history ranks among nation’s top programs for research Excellence
March 27, 2026 Written by Department of Art History Staff
UD Art History ranks sixth in the U.S. for major fellowships
The University of Delaware Department of Art History has been ranked sixth among 784 international institutions to receive major fellowships, according to a new study conducted by the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH).
ARIAH launched the Scholars Data Project last year to analyze trends in art history funding since 1961. The project aggregated data from four prestigious residential programs: The Clark, the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
UD earned a total of 87 awards, with most active faculty members and a significant number of pre-doctoral and postdoctoral fellows securing funding from these elite institutions. UD’s Jessica Horton, professor of art history, holds the unique distinction of being the only art historian out of almost 4,000 recipients to receive funding from all four institutions.
“This data confirms what we have already known all along—our department stands alongside the most prestigious institutions in the United States,” said Department Chair Mónica Domínguez Torres. “Since its founding in 1966, the department has fostered excellence in research and trained generations of scholars who now hold influential positions worldwide.”
Domínguez Torres expressed pride in the department’s graduate students, who accounted for the largest portion of the reported awards. "This achievement underscores the success of UD graduate students in securing pre-doctoral fellowships," she said.
The Department of Art History is committed to undergraduate education for majors and non-majors and to training graduate students who will be competitive at the higher reaches of the discipline as educators, museum curators and scholars dedicated to research. To learn more, visit the department's website.
Recent art history fellowships
Jason Hill, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Delaware Department of Art History
Jason Hill received the Getty fellowship in January through June 2024 and the National Gallery fellowship in September 2024–May 2025.
Hill’s research focuses on the intersection of media technology, photography and policing, examining how photojournalists, primarily between 1930–1980, used tools like police radios to determine their subjects and capture images. This work reframes traditional approaches to art history by placing the technology of police scanners in the role of arts patron, and the introduction of flash photography in the role of art medium.
Hill takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying photographers like Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Ad Reinhardt, Ernest Withers and David Guttenfelder, drawing on media studies, police history and technology to trace how photographic practices both documented and shaped cultural attitudes toward crime, policing and the carceral state.
Hill brings his research directly to the classroom, teaching courses on photography, crime and the carceral state. He credits UD’s support for faculty research with enabling his work to flourish.
Mónica Domínguez Torres, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art History
Mónica Domínguez Torres received a 2019–2020 Getty scholar in residence, during which she completed her second book, Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion. Domínguez Torres was part of a cohort of scholars working on issues of art and ecology. The theme invited scholars to address the strategies and forms through which ecological concepts are generated, adopted, staged and negotiated in the realm of the visual arts and architecture. “It was very timely to start discussing topics related to art and ecology at the Getty,” Domínguez Torres said. “Shortly before, a sudden and destructive wildfire—dubbed ‘the Getty fire’ because of its proximity to the Getty Center—forced a week-long closure of the iconic L.A. site, as well as a quick evacuation of all the fellows from the Getty Scholar Housing complex.”
As a scholar in residence at the Getty, Domínguez Torres was also invited to participate in a two-day seminar to prepare an exhibition about Alfredo Boulton at the Getty in 2022. Boulton was a pioneer in the field of colonial art in Venezuela, and actually the broker who initiated in the 1950s the scientific study of Cubagua Island, the first pearling center of the Caribbean, which plays an important role in Professor Domínguez Torres’s scholarship.
Jennifer Van Horn, professor in the Department of Art History and Department of History
Jennifer Van Horn received the 2018–2019 fellowship to work on her second book, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery (Yale University Press, 2022). Portraits of Resistance centers on the complex entanglements between enslaved Americans of African origin and descent and the painted portrait. The book recovers portraiture as a site for enslaved people’s creativity and resistance in the 18th and 19th-century United States.
Michele Frederick, Curator of European Art and Provenance Research, North Carolina Museum of Art, Ph.D. in Art History 2019
Michele Frederick received a one year non-residential 2017–2018 fellowship in conducting dissertation research and writing abroad (Netherlands, Germany, England), and one year 2018–2019 in residence at CASVA in Washington, D.C., where she finished the dissertation, Shaping the Royal Image: Gerrit van Honthorst and the Stuart Courts in London and The Hague. She credited the competitive but supportive atmosphere at CASVA, where other predoctoral fellows and senior fellows would help with application materials and prepare for interviews, with helping take her research to a level above where it would have been in isolation. Support from the Department of Art History and intensive advice from her doctoral advisor lead to Frederick receiving multiple fellowship offers.
Megan Baker, doctoral student, University of Delaware Department of Art History, Ph.D. 2027
As a 2024–2025 Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, Megan Baker spent a year conducting research and writing a chapter of her dissertation, which investigates the surprising popularity of the pastel medium in North America around the time of the American Revolution. The rigorous training she received at the UD Department of Art History, with its deep investment in material and object-based questions, enabled Baker to develop a project that participates in ongoing conversations in art history while contributing new knowledge about historical techniques and their embodied practice.
At the Smithsonian, Baker learned from and with curators and conservators to better understand artistic methods and the physical possibilities of the medium itself. She also immersed herself in the community of fellow scholars-in-residence, many of whom have become trusted colleagues and collaborators. Baker’s time at the Smithsonian invigorated new questions in research while advancing the writing of her dissertation, which she has continued this year as a dissertation fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
