Fellowships

Zuni stone ram fetish with inlaid turquoise eyes, carved by Jeff Davis for tourist trade, 1988. Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Autry National Center 2004.29.77

The Autry National Center’s Institute for the Study of the American West is pleased to announce the Jonathan Heritage Foundation Fellowship, a new annual award for independent scholars, PhD candidates and post-doctoral researchers focused on the social, cultural or business history of the Los Angeles region, circa 1895-1950. Applicants working in the field of Western history are also invited to consider the Institute’s Los Angeles Westerners Fellowship and/or Visiting Scholar Fellowship. Graduate students attending UCLA are eligible for the Autry Summer Fellowship. All fellows have access to the collections of the Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Autry Library, and Museum of the American West. The Institute also confers the Butcher Scholar Award.

2008 Visiting Scholar Fellowships

Dr. Vera Parham, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Hawaii, Hilo, worked with our vast image resources for her project, Fishing in the West: Taming an Economy, focused on tracking the parallels in the history of the West and the imagery of fish and fishing in the West.  Collections consulted included photo albums of people vacationing and fishing, the images of Native life in Alaska by Gladys Knight Harris, and promotional/propaganda images such as those found in sports fishing magazines and dude ranch brochures.

Dr. Catherine Cocks, Co-Director and Executive Editor, SAR Press, used visual and textual sources for her topic Tropical Whites: Tourism, Culture, and the Modern Self, a study of the development of a resort region in Southern California, Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean. Materials examined included the Lottie Tillotson Collection, the Newmark Collection, Mexican postcards, fruit crate labels, Southern Pacific lantern slides, guidebooks, travel letters, diaries, memoirs, and works of travel writing dating from 1880-1941.

Mary Zundo, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Illinois, worked on her dissertation, Mapping Destiny: Cartography and 19th-Century American Art of the Frontier. Looking at the ways in which map-making and western exploration informed not only the depiction of the lands and inhabitants west of the Mississippi River, but the way Americans understood their nation, Zundo studied artifacts such as Kit Carson’s powder horn, which is engraved with a map and other images, John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress, California pictorial lettersheets and ledger drawings by Cheyenne artists Zo-Tom and Howling Wolf. She also read secondary literature on native Plains peoples, travel guides and maps.

2008 Autry Summer Fellowship

Erika Perez, found a wealth of secondary material as well as primary resources while researching the colonial regulation of intimacy in California. One of her most exciting finds was The Doctrina and Confesionario of Juan Cortés, a late-eighteenth century confessional manual by Fray Juan Cortés. The text illustrates Franciscan intrusions into the intimate lives and sexuality of native Californians. In it, key precepts of the Catholic doctrine and confessional questions are translated in both Spanish and Barbareño, one of the many dialects that existed among the Chumash.

2008 Los Angeles Westerners Fellowship

Albert Fu worked on his dissertation Landscapes of Spanish-Colonial Revival: Popular Culture and Urban Development in Southern California. Fu compared popular culture and urban development in the region during the 1920s and the 1990s by studying manuscript materials from the Lummis collection, serials, photographs, secondary sources on southern California architecture, movie stills, and regional booster publications such as those put out by Title Insurance and Trust Company.