Ryan Dohoney, assistant professor of musicology in the Bienen School of Music, has been awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for 2015, the organization announced recently.

ACLS awarded 70 fellowships to faculty of all ranks and independent scholars to support six to 12 months of full-time research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. ACLS received 1,000 applications in this cycle, making this year’s program the most competitive to date.

Professor Dohoney, who is the only fellow from Northwestern University for 2015, said it’s an honor to be included among this year’s terrific group of scholars.

“I’m looking forward to spending the fellowship year completing my book manuscript,” Professor Dohoney said. “I’m grateful to the council for the opportunity to focus so intensely on my research and writing.”

Professor Dohoney receives funding to support his research on “Abstraction as Ecumenism in Late Modernity: Morton Feldman and the Rothko Chapel.” This study develops a microhistorical analysis of the premier of Morton Feldman’s music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston on April 9, 1972. The project reconstructs the network of artists, musicians, and patrons who collaborated on the event – composer Morton Feldman, painter Mark Rothko, violist Karen Philips, and the patrons Dominique and John de Menil – and explores how these collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling.

According to Matthew Goldfeder, director of fellowship programs at ACLS, fellows were chosen for their potential to create new knowledge resulting from investigations and reflections on diverse cultures, texts, and artifacts from across the globe and human history.

"ACLS employs a rigorous multi-stage peer-review process to ensure that humanities scholars themselves select those fellows who exemplify the very best in their fields,” Goldfeder said.

The program is funded by ACLS’s endowment, which has received contributions from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council’s college and university Associates, past fellows, and individual friends of ACLS.

For more information about ACLS, visit www.acls.org


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