Congratulations to Lara Nicholls, PhD candidate in the ANU Centre for Art History and Theory, who has been awarded the inaugural Jennifer Strauss Fellowship in the Humanities, by the Australian Graduate Women Inc. (AGW)

The theme of Lara’s current PhD at the Australian National University is the professionalization and the transnational experience of women artists in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century.

Her Fellowship project, Impression Fever: Australian Women Impressionists and their circle, proposes a substantial extension, not only of the content of her research but also of its reach into the public sphere. Fellowship funds will be used to research and produce an exhibition blueprint, draft catalogue essay and entries, checklist of works of art and budget for a travelling exhibition that could be displayed in State and regional galleries in 2022-23.

The exclusion of these women from recognition in an art world dominated at the time by fixed and often highly masculinist views of landscape and culture has led to years of neglect and deaccession. Fresh research bringing together ignored works and well-known treasures in an innovative and illuminating exhibition may change that and give Australians a new and accessible way of viewing the images that make their histories.

This ambitious project requires not only time-out from paid employment, but also visits to State Galleries and Libraries in order to access un-digitized artist archives from the late nineteenth century and enable formation of the necessary canon of forgotten and unknown work by women artists of the period. Fellowship funding will make this possible. *

About AGW:

From its 1922 foundation, the organisation known initially as the Australian Federation of University Women, then as the Australian Federation of Graduate Women and now as Australian Graduate Women (AGW), has seen the provision of Fellowships for university students as an important way of furthering its aim to enable women to access higher education in order that they could both fulfil their personal ambitions and apply their acquired knowledge and skills at all levels of public life.

Eighty-eight years later, AGW offers three annual Fellowships open to women PhD students at any Australian university. Two of these, funded by a generous bequest from a past AFUW President, Barbara Hale, are open to students in any discipline. From 2020, however, the third Fellowship, funded by accumulated bequests and member donations, will rotate between the Jennifer Strauss fellowship in the Humanities and the Georgina Sweet Fellowship in STEMM. *

Learn more about this organisation here.

* Text provided by Australian Graduate Women Inc.