Juliet Koss, Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Chair in the History of Architecture and Art and professor of art history at Scripps College, has received an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art for the 2021–22 academic year. During her fellowship, Koss will complete her current book, Model Soviets, which explores the status and function of models—architectural designs, art objects, and abstract representations of future possibilities—in the first two Soviet decades, when Communism itself operated as a conceptual model for a utopian future under constant reformulation. The book received a Furthermore Publication Grant from the J. M. Kaplan Fund in 2020 and is under contract with The MIT Press.
“I’m thrilled to be spending the year at the Center for Advanced Study for the Visual Arts, with the time and the resources to carry out my research and complete my book,” says Koss. “This year’s scholarly and intellectual community at the Center and at the National Gallery more broadly promises to be especially spectacular.”
Founded in 1979, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts is a research institute that fosters study of the production, use, and cultural meaning of art, artifacts, architecture, urbanism, photography, and film worldwide from prehistoric times through the present. This year’s appointees include three named professors, a named lecturer, seven senior fellows, six visiting senior fellows, two sabbatical fellows, two postdoctoral fellows, and 18 predoctoral fellows. Those who relocate to Washington are provided with housing near the National Gallery of Art and offices in the East Building of the National Gallery, with access to the NGA Library’s resources.
Koss has published widely in Europe and the United States on modern European art and architecture, with an emphasis on Germany and the USSR; her book Modernism after Wagner (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) received a Millard Meiss Publication Award from the College Art Association and was a finalist for the CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She is also the recipient of research fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, among others; a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2009, she also served as the Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professor at the Institute for Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2011.