Kelsey Museum Curator Terry Wilfong has been awarded a Michigan Humanities Award for his ongoing research on artist Hamzeh Carr. The Michigan Humanities Awards are competitive annual fellowships that provide LSA faculty members working on projects in the humanities and qualitative social sciences a term off with salary.
In 1925, University of Michigan archaeologists commissioned Carr to create facsimiles—now in the Kelsey Museum’s collections—of the colorful murals discovered in Karanis, Egypt. Although Carr had long been thought to be a local Egyptian artist, Terry’s initial research has indicated that Carr was an Englishman “working under a pseudonym, briefly fashionable in the 1920s, a convert to Islam as well as an adherent of Theosophy, and an integral part of Cairo’s expatriate gay community, with unexpected connections to many cultural figures of his period.”
Terry plans to combine his Michigan Humanities Award with an upcoming sabbatical, allowing him to spend all of 2025 working on his Hamzeh Carr research. For more information on Terry’s discoveries as yet, watch this recorded lecture or read “Searching for Hamzeh Carr” in the Spring 2021 edition of the Kelsey Museum Newsletter.
Congratulations, Terry!
