USC Dornsife art historian named a Guggenheim Fellow
Lisa Pon, professor of art history at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
Pon is one of 184 writers, scholars, artists and scientists — representing 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields and 73 academic institutions in the United States and Canada — selected by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from about 3,000 applicants.
“I’m thrilled to have been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,” said Pon, who joins three other members of USC Dornsife’s Department of Art History who have earned the honor in recent years: Vanessa Schwartz, professor of art history and history; Susanna Berger, associate professor of art history and philosophy; and Kate Flint, Provost Professor of Art History and English.
“This fellowship will give me time for focused writing and, hopefully, post-pandemic research travel,” Pon said.
She will use the Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her book about the Renaissance artist Raphael. The project, Pon says, goes against the basic idea of an art historical monograph — which normally focuses on a single work of art or artist — by examining the partners and collaborations in Raphael’s personal and professional networks.
“Thus, my book is fundamentally about how we write about art and artists, what we want to know and can know historically, and what sustains our visual interest and intellectual curiosity, especially after 500 years of art writing.”
Broad art history expertise and study
Pon specializes in early modern European art, architecture and material culture. Her work focuses on the mobilities of art, artistic authority and collaboration, and the Renaissance concept of copia, or abundance.
In addition to the Raphael-centered project, Pon is writing a book that examines fears about contagion, both biological and moral, in early modern Venice. She also heads a project that aims to digitally reconstruct the library of Julius II and virtually return the 16th-century pope’s books to their intended setting in the Vatican Palace’s Stanza della Segnatura, where Raphael’s most famous frescoes reside. The project earned a 2021–22 Digital Humanities Advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Pon’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art, Spain’s Ministry of Culture and the Getty Research Institute, among other esteemed organizations.
About the Guggenheim Fellowship
Created in 1925 by U.S. Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his spouse, Olga Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation offers fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form.
Applications for the fellowship undergo review by experts in each applicant’s field. Fewer than 200 Guggenheim Fellowships are then awarded to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.