University of North Texas

Jennifer Way, associate professor of art history, has received a Terra Foundation for American Art Senior Fellow award at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The award supports research for her book project, Politics of the Handmade: The Significance of Southeast Asian Handicraft for America, ca. 1955-1961. She will take the fellowship in 2011.

These fellowships support cross-cultural dialogue about the history of art of the United States to 1980.

Way's is the first research project to study  the political and cultural significance of handicrafts as part of U.S.-Vietnam relations during French and U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

A portion of the research for summer 2010 has been funded by a Research Grant from the Design History Society, the leading organization for design historians, curators and practitioners.