Three History of Art Graduates Win Fulbright-Hays Award

On his Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship, Ross Bernhaut will be pursuing a longue-durée study of the architectural development of the fortified hilltop city that towers hundreds of feet above the congested urban sprawl of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh, India. Between the early medieval and early modern periods, Gwalior hill was coveted by a variety of religious groups—Hindus, Jains, Muslims, and Sikhs—as well as various regional and supra-regional polities. Throughout its long history, Gwalior hill has witnessed an extraordinary array of architectural interventions, including but not limited to the foundation of numerous Hindu temples, the fabrication of hundreds of colossal Jain sculptures and rock-hewn sanctuaries, the construction of royal palaces, the establishment of funerary monuments and civic structures, and the desecration of many of these very same buildings and images. Ross’s project endeavors to reconstruct the original appearance of the hilltop by analyzing dislocated sculptures, reconstructing iconographic programs, investigating the adaptation and transformation of structures over time, and utilizing textual and material evidence to postulate which buildings may have once stood but no longer remain. It also seeks to understand how subsequent interventions responded—formally, spatially, and conceptually—to existing structures on Gwalior hill. Ultimately, the project hopes to expand our understanding of the role Gwalior hill has played in the political, social, religious, and architectural landscape of northern India, and contextualize its specific history within regional developments in hill fort urbanism

With the support of the Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (DDRA), I plan to visit museum collections at the Louvre in Paris; the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the David Collection in Copenhagen; and the Islamic Art Museum in Cairo. Over the course of nine months of travel, I plan to conduct research on objects held in these collections as part of my dissertation project “Adab Oblige: The Art of Medieval Islamic Dining, 850-1450.” My project investigates medieval Islamic dining and eating culture through a series of case studies of ceramics and metalwares from the period, which functioned as eating and drinking vessels. Thanks to the Fulbright Hays, I will immerse myself in a wide corpus of medieval Islamic objects to understand how they operated in dining contexts in Egypt, Syria, Central Asia, and Iraq between the ninth and fifteenth centuries.