Douglas Gabriel ’19 awarded Getty Foundation and ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art History

Douglas Gabriel ’19 was awarded a Getty/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship in the History of Art for 2021. This fellowship supports an academic year of research and/or writing by early career scholars for a project that will make a substantial and original contribution to the understanding of art and its history. Gabriel is one of 10 early-career scholars from around the globe in the 2021 cohort.

Gabriel received his Ph.D. in Art History from Northwestern in June 2019. His dissertation, Over the Mountain: Realism Towards Reunification in Cold War Korea, 1980–1994, examined connections between the visual art of the minjung democratization movement in South Korea and the work of state-sponsored artists in North Korea.

Currently Gabriel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Korean Studies at The George Washington University. His research project for the Getty/ACLS Fellowship in the History of Art will be titled Over the Mountain: Realism, Reunification, and the Resounding Cold War Across the Two Koreas.

“Scholars often cite the years between 1980 and 1994 as marking the demise of socialist realism in tandem with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of neoliberal network societies. By focusing on the aesthetic affinities that emerged between the work of North and South Korean artists, however, this book argues that realism was mobilized at this critical juncture as a means of destabilizing the Cold War ideological forces dividing the peninsula and shaping the world at large,” shares Gabriel about his current research.

Learn more about Douglas Gabriel’s fellowship for 2021 on the ACLS profile.