Rebecca Zorach awarded Ver Steeg Fellowship

Award honors tenured faculty for research excellence

Northwestern University professor Rebecca Zorach is a recipient of the 19th annual Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship Award.

The Ver Steeg Fellowship supports the research of a tenured Northwestern faculty member whose work enhances the reputation of Northwestern nationally and internationally and comes with a one-time research grant of $45,000.

Zorach is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History.

Zorach studies the art of early modern Europe and the post-1960s U.S., focusing on political aspects of the visual arts. In her work on 20th and 21st century art, she has focused on artists involved in political movements such as Black liberation, abolition and environmental justice. In current research on early modern European and transatlantic art and science, she is studying transformations in the idea of nature as a counterpart to art, specifically considering the idea of nature as an artist and creator of images.

“I’m so very grateful for this award,” Zorach said. “And given all the impressive colleagues I have at Northwestern, I’m all the more surprised and humbled. With the cost of images and research travel, publishing in art history is expensive, and the fellowship will help defray those costs. But more importantly, I want to use these funds to extend the work of the Art, Community, and Environment research workshop I’ll be co-leading at the Kaplan Institute beginning next year and strengthen our collaborations both internationally and locally around ecology and environmental justice.”

Zorach is the author of four books, the most recent being “Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise” and “Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975.” She has held visiting professorships at Williams College, the American Academy in Rome, Villa I Tatti and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Zorach also serves on the board of the South Side Community Art Center and co-organizes the archive and oral history project Never the Same with Daniel Tucker.

The Ver Steeg Fellowship was established and endowed by the late Clarence L. Ver Steeg and his wife, Dorothy. Clarence Ver Steeg was a Northwestern faculty member for many years in the department of history and served as dean of The Graduate School from 1975 to 1986.

The complete list of award recipients can be found on the Office of the Provost website.