Dr. Odell Secures Funding for International Workshop

Associate Professor of Art Dawn Odell has been awarded a $15,000 grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. This joint ACLS/CCKF program, Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society, supports collaborative meetings, conferences, and workshops in the humanities and related social sciences that adopt an explicitly cross-cultural or comparative perspective. These grant funds will allow Dr. Odell and her collaborators to prepare and present a workshop entitled Art Between China, Europe, and the United States: Researching the van Braam Collection of Chinese Art in September 2019. To be hosted at the Peabody Essex Museum in Boston, this engaging workshop will focus on a collection of Chinese art amassed in the eighteenth century by Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (1739-1801)—which has also been the focus of Dr. Odell’s recent research. It is not a coincidence that Dr. Odell and her collaborator, Emory University Professor of History Tonio Andrade, proposed to host this workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum; it is both the site where 249 of van Braam’s paintings were recently rediscovered and also the largest and most comprehensive collection of Chinese export art in the world. Funding will allow Drs. Odell and Andrade to bring together seven selected scholars from Taiwan, China, Italy, and the United States. The three-day workshop will allow participants to work on individual strands of intertwined and related research, provide a rare opportunity for the selected scholars to develop two new collaborative research projects—a digital exposition and an exhibition, and to collectively discuss recent and innovative approaches to the study of cross-cultural materials. Dr. Odell and her team hope to build on this workshop with a future major international conference and other large-scale collaborative research projects.