EVANSTON, Ill. --- Sarah E. Fraser, associate professor and chair of art history at Northwestern University, has been awarded a 2007-08 fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. 

As a Getty Scholar, Fraser will participate with other senior scholars in a year-long program on historical change. She will be finishing a book entitled, “What Is Chinese About Chinese Art?,” on the links between archaeology, national identity and politics after the end of dynastic China, 1928-1947. 

Fraser was also awarded the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, which supports long-term, unusually ambitious projects in the humanities and social sciences by the American Council of Learned Societies. The Burkhardt fellowship carries with it an affiliation at one of 11 national research centers. Fraser was awarded membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies.

Fraser's study interrogates the western Chinese frontier in the historical imagination where Tibetan, Hui, and Qiang communities often collide with hegemonic Han culture. During the early 20th century, anthropologists, archaeologists and artists surveyed the border regions to create a linguistic and aesthetic canon relevant to the new nation state. Fraser will demonstrate how the archaeological discoveries in the multicultural frontier were central to conceptions of modern China.

Fraser's earlier studies include “Performing the Visual: the Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia, 618-960” (Stanford, 2004), which was recognized as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice and Merit, Opulence, and the Buddhist Network of Wealth, an anthology of essays on Buddhist art in Silk Road medieval temples (Shanghai Fine Arts, 2003). 

She is also Chief Editor of Wall Painting and Architecture in a new genre of web-based, research infrastructures in the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, ARTstor.

I think it signified the end of the 20th Century.

-Professor Peter Hayes on the Fall of the Berlin Wall