December 11, 2000

Contact: Charles Eldredge, art history, (785) 864-4713.

KU student uses award to fund dissertation

LAWRENCE -- An art history doctoral student has received an $18,500 Henry Luce fellowship to work on her dissertation "Picturing Justice: Trial and Punishment in American Visual Culture, 1850-1880."

Kerry Morgan of Ashland, Ore., is a Henry Luce/American Council of Learned Societies doctoral fellow in American art. The fellowship covers Morgan's living expenses while completing her dissertation.

The Henry Luce Foundation annually funds a limited number of dissertation proposals in American art. In 2000, ten awards were made nationwide, chosen from 69 applications from 32 institutions. The grant program is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies, New York, a private, non-profit organization devoted to the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning.

Morgan's dissertation addresess how the U.S. legal system was pictured before and after the Civil War and the effect those images had in developing perceptions of the legal system. Morgan is exploring a wide-range of visual objects that were produced from 1850 to 1880.

She presented her research on the trial and execution of those involved in Abraham Lincoln's death to the California American Studies Association in May 1999 in Santa Cruz, Calif. Morgan also delivered a paper on depictions of courtroom scenes to the American Society of Legal History in Oct. 1999 in Toronto.

Morgan became interested in scenes of violence through a KU graduate course on art of the 1930s, which sparked her interest in the production of violent imagery, and compelled her to explore earlier time periods for similar images.

Since her dissertation proposal was accepted by KU's art history faculty, Morgan has conducted research at the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society and at other research institutions in New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Salem, Mass.

KU's art history faculty accepted Morgan's dissertation proposal in 1998. Her dissertation adviser, Charles Eldredge, KU Hall distinguished professor of American art and culture, said: "Kerry Morgan's dissertation proposal ... came after weighing several alternative subjects," Eldredge said. "It was apparently a return to her first love in art history, to a scholarly passion that should sustain her over the course of her ambitious project, insuring its timely completion."