Three School of Art faculty have been awarded various funding to support their research during 2017–2018 from the University’s Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, which promotes research and creativity in the humanities and arts. 

Assistant Professor Benjamin Britton received a Willson Center Research Fellowship for spring of 2018 which will allow Britton time to dedicated to his creative practice. Specifically he will explore a new painting project while attending artist residencies in Ireland at the Burren College of Art and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation. The new body of work propose to destabilize the knowledge of where the body is located from the sensation of its position in the landscape. These paintings propose to use this dislocation to explore the human relationship to ecological conditions. 

Assistant Professor of Art History Nicolas Morrissey received support from the Willson Center through the A2RU Research Cluster to fund travel to Bengal, India and Paharpur, Bangladesh in order to investigate and document a recently excavated corpus of Buddhist terracotta sculptures dating to the 9th century CE. Morrissey's proposal was titled "“The Enigmatic Terracotta Sculptures of Nandadirghika: Reconsidering Pala Patronage and Buddhist Material Culture in Medieval South Asia”. 

Professor Melissa Harshman was awarded a Research Fellowship for her proposed project, Overlaps and Intersections: Printmaking, Crochet, and Sewing in which she will pursue creation of work that combines these various techniques. This funding will allow Harshman to a take part in a winter residency in support of this work at the Penland School of Crafts in Penland, NC during January 2017.

below: Melissa Harshman: Red Mandala